Future semiconductor detectors using advanced microelectronics with post-processing, hybridization and packaging technology

Abstract

Several challenges for tracking with semiconductor detectors in the high rate environment of future elementary particle physics experiments are discussed, such as reduction of spurious hits and ambiguities and identification of short-lived ‘messenger’ particles inside jets. To meet these requirements, the instrumentation increasingly calls on progress in microelectronics. Advanced silicon integration technology for 3D packaging now offers post-processing of CMOS such as wafer thinning to 50 μm and through-wafer vias of <10 μm. These technologies might be applied to create new tracking detectors which can handle vertexing under the difficult rate conditions. The sensor layers can be only ∼50 μm thick with low-noise performance and better radiation hardness by using small volume pixels. Multi-layer sensors with integrated coincidence signal processing could discriminate real tracks from various sources of background. Even in a ∼400 μm thick 3D assembly, the vectors of tracks can be determined in ∼10° bins and this multi-voxel device is called ‘vector detector’. The measured vectors can be used to associate the main tracks to their vertices in the interaction region at high luminosity colliders and to establish an on-line, first-level trigger signature.