Dark current–voltage characteristics of vacuum deposited multilayer amorphous selenium-alloy detectors and the effect of x-ray irradiation

Abstract

Doped and stabilized amorphous selenium (a-Se) alloys in a multilayer form are currently used as a photoconductor in direct conversion flat panel x-ray imagers in mammography and tomosynthesis. While much progress has been made on the physics of such detectors, there are still unresolved questions on such issues as the principles of operation of the so-called p-i-n detector structure in extinguishing the dark current. The present paper examines dark current transients after the application of a voltage in seven types of a-Se alloy based devices: i-layer, i-n, n-i, i-p, p-i, p-i-n, and n-i-p structures. The substrate was ITO coated glass, the top (radiation receiving) electrode was chromium, and the films were fabricated by vacuum deposition. The nominal device thickness was 200 μm, similar to commercial mammographic detectors. It is shown that n-i, i-n, n-i-p, and p-i-n devices have dark currents less than 1 pA mm−2 at an applied field of 10 V/μm. The dark current in the p-i-n device is the lowest at approximately 0.01 pA mm−2 at an applied field of 10 V μm−1. Experiments have been carried out by subjecting the detector to a staircase voltage-time profile during the voltage application (turn-on) and a staircase voltage ramp-down during the turning-off of the bias voltage. Step-voltage ramp-up and step-voltage ramp-down current transient are typical of expected dark current transient behavior in a semiconductor with traps in which carriers are captured and released from various trap centers in the bandgap. The dark current transients are qualitatively similar to those expected from a capacitor in parallel with a large resistor and both in series with a much smaller resistor. Current transients during charging and discharging experiments were integrated to find how much of the injected charge is released during discharge experiments. It is shown that the majority of this trapped charge is stored in the n-type and p-type blocking layers, near the contacts. The trapped carriers in the i-layer represent a very small portion. The evolution of the dark current upon single and repeated x-ray exposure has also been examined in n-i and p-i-n devices. Right after the cessation of irradiation, there is an excess or residual dark current whose magnitude is roughly ∼20 times higher in p-i-n and about ∼2 times higher in the case of n-i under an exposure of 3.36 R and a mean photon energy of 34.2 keV. The absorbed dose is 1.53 Gy. The excess dark current has a fast decay component with a time constant ∼10 s and a slow component with a time constant ∼100 s. It is shown that the decay in the irradiation induced excess dark current is very similar to the initial dark current. There is no permanent change in the dark current, and within a few hundred seconds, the dark current reaches the same level as that in the unexposed detector. The experimental results in this work highlight the distinct advantages of p-i-n and n-i-type a-Se multilayer structures in x-ray detection applications.