Design and Bolometer Characterization of the SPT-3G First-Year Focal Plane

During the austral summer of 2016–2017, the third-generation camera, SPT-3G, was installed on the South Pole Telescope, increasing the detector count in the focal plane by an order of magnitude relative to the previous generation. Designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, SPT-3G contains ten 6 $$''$$ -hexagonal modules of detectors, each with 269 trichroic and dual-polarization pixels, read out using 68 $$\times $$ frequency-domain multiplexing. Here we discuss design, assembly, and layout of the modules, as well as early performance characterization of the first-year array, including yield and detector properties.