Development of Commercial Foundry Source for Science-Grade Charged Particle Imagers

Currently there are no CMOS imaging foundries available, especially domestic, which offer services that provide the high performance required for charge coupled imaging. As wafer sizes increase and feature sizes decrease, the cost of prototyping a science grade imager can easily exceed $0.25M. Furthermore, without a stable source of science grade imager fabrication services, designers are left working with overseas fabs to perform the necessary process development. A domestic source of hybrid SOI CMOS imaging services is proposed. The cryogenic and radiation design models will be developed in Phase I, and in Phase II, a hybrid SOI CMOS process, which allows separate detector and circuit layer silicon will be developed, characterized, and offered to the market in multi-project wafer or full wafer services.COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS AND OTHER BENEFITS: Silicon imagers are used throughout the industrial, scientific, and medical communities. Thin, low mass imagers and thick fully depleted imagers, in particular, are not well served by commercial foundry `imaging