Radiation hardness study on a CMOS pixel sensor for charged particle tracking

Abstract

A CMOS pixel sensor, named Supix-1, is developed for a pixelated silicon tracker for the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC) project. The sensor, consisted of nine sectors varying in pixel sizes, diode sizes and geometries, is fabricated with a 180 nm CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) process to study the particle detection performance of enlarged pixels. In this work, the radiation-induced effects on the charge collection of the sensor under the fluence of 1 $\times$ 10^13 1 MeV neq/cm^2 are studied by the measurements with the radioactive source of Fe-55 and the Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations, since the radiation hardness of 6.8 $\times$ 10^12 1 MeV neq/cm^2 per year for Non-Ionizing Energy Loss (NIEL) effects is required. In measurements, the sensor gain has been calibrated using the k-$\alpha$ peak of Fe-55 before and after irradiation. The pixel-wise equivalent noise charge (ENC), charge collection efficiency (CCE) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were evaluated. The radiation-induced effects on cluster properties are studied through a self-developed reconstruction algorithm. In TCAD simulations, charge collections in 5 $\times$ 5 pixel matrixes for two typical impinging cases of incident particles were simulated with and without irradiation. Both measurements and simulations indicate that enlarged pixels with area of 21 $\mu$m $\times$ 84 $\mu$m, though suffering greater loss on sensor performance than small pixels do, still have satisfactory noise and charge collection performance after irradiation for particle tracking in the upcoming collider detectors.