Silicon Drift Detectors with On-Chip Electronics for X-Ray Spectroscopy

The paper reports a Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) with on-chip front-end electronics. These detectors will be used for high resolution X-rays spectroscopy applications, either at room temperature or at cryogenic conditions, and can efficiently operate at very high rates of the impinging radiation (10⁵ cps/cm²). Silicon Drift Detectors, proposed for the first time in 1983, are fully depleted detectors in which an electric field parallel to the surface, created by properly biasing contiguous p+ strips, drift the signal electrons toward a collecting anode. The peculiar characteristics of this detector is the extremely low anode capacitance, independent of the active area. These detectors have already shown their capabilities in an increasing number of applications, having been used recently as vertex detectors in high energy physics experiments for the reconstruction of particle tracks (spatial resolution of 20-40mm), or for X and ¿ rays spectroscopy of radioactive sources (energy resolution of 100-200 electrons rms). All these realisations were with external electronics.