Simulation of monolithic active pixels in deep sub-micron technologies

The use of monolithic active pixels (MAPS) has quickly spread in a number of scientific fields ranging from imaging to high-energy particle physics applications. The success of MAPS is due to a number of reasons, for example their low power consumption, fast readout, high spatial resolution and low cost. The latter reflects the use of standard CMOS processes for fabrication. In this paper, the performance of MAPS designed in 0.25 μm technology will be modelled by means of TCAD device simulation software. The dependence of the device performance on parameters that affect the detection of minimum ionising particles (MIP) will be studied aiming at the optimisation of the detector performance. More specifically, the simulations will focus on the influence of the epitaxial layer thickness on the amount of collected charge, that defines the signal and the cluster size, that affects the spatial resolution.