Improvement of the charge-carrier transport property of polycrystalline CdTe for digital fluoroscopy

Minimizing the radiation impact to the patient is currently an important issue in medical imaging. Particularly, in case of X-ray fluoroscopy, the patient is exposed to high X-ray dose because a large number of images is required in fluoroscopic procedures. In this regard, a direct-conversion X-ray sensor offers the advantages of high quantum efficiency, X-ray sensitivity, and high spatial resolution. In particular, an X-ray sensor in fluoroscopy operates at high frame rate, in the range from 30 to 60 image frames per second. Therefore, charge-carrier transport properties and signal lag are important factors for the development of X-ray sensors in fluoroscopy. In this study, in order to improve the characteristics of polycrystalline cadmium telluride (CdTe), CdTe films were prepared by thermal evaporation and RF sputtering. The deposition was conducted to form a CdTeO3 layer on top of a CdTe film. The role of CdTeO3 is not only to improve the charge-carrier transport by increasing the life-time but also to reduce the leakage current of CdTe films by acting as a passivation layer. In this paper, to establish the effect of a thin oxide layer on top of a CdTe film, the morphological and electrical properties including charge-carrier transport and signal lag were investigated by means of X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, and resistivity measurements.