The design and performance of the silicon detectors for CLEO III

The results of the research and development on the silicon detectors for the CLEO III vertex detector are reported. Since the CLEO III detector design requires up to five detectors to be daisy chained, a significant amount of effort was directed at reducing capacitance. We have succeeded in designing a 5 cm/spl times/2.5 cm double metal (z-side) detector with less than 10 pF strip capacitance. Capacitance is also near 10 pF for the r-/spl phi/ side. In addition, we have developed a novel p-barrier design (to isolate strips on the ohmic side) which virtually eliminates the Johnson noise component which results from the ohmic character of this type of isolation. We also report noise and cosmic ray signal data from various length ladders.