High-performance CCD on high-resistivity silicon

ABSTRACT In this paper we present new results from the characterization of a fully depleted CCD on high resistivity silicon. The CCDwas fabricated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on a 10-12 KQ-cm n-type silicon substrate. The CCD is a 200X20015-rim square pixel array. The high resistivity of the starting material makes it possible to deplete the entire 300 tm thick sub-strate. This results in improved red and near infrared response compared to a standard CCD. Because the substrate is fullydepleted, thinning of the CCD is not required for backside illumination, and the results presented here were obtained with abackside illuminated device. In this paper we present measured quantum efficiency as a function of temperature, and wedescribe a novel clocking scheme to measure serial charge transfer efficiency. We demonstrate an industrial application inwhich the CCD is more than an order of magnitude more sensitive than a commercial camera using a standard CCD.Keywords: CCD, high resistivity, fully depleted, Lick Observatory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, astronomical