Ripon College1, Physics, Ripon, WI 54971 Brookhaven National Laboratory2, Instrumentation Division, Upton, NY 11973
Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Instrumentation Division is characterizing Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The devices are 100µm thick, with 10µm square pixels arranged in a 4k x 4k format. The 189 individual N-channel back-illuminated CCDs required for LSST will not be built in-house, but will rather be purchased from vendors. Since vendors will not provide a simulation model that the LSST group can use to evaluate the electronic performance of the CCD sensors, this project entails the development of a simulation using Silvaco software. This simulation is based on approximate dimensions provided by manufacturers’ literature and communications with the LSST group. Although various layer thicknesses and general layout of these CCDs are known, exact feature dimensions and doping recipes are left to experimentation. Through these simulations, valuable data regarding inter-electrode capacitance, electric field, and operation of the CCD’s read node reset transistor have been obtained. These data will be useful in determining sources of noise and various other electronic behaviors which occur during the image readout process.
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