1980, a revolution in silicon detectors, from energy spectrometer to radiation imager: Some technical and historical details

Silicon nuclear particle detectors were introduced just 50 years ago, after single crystal manufacturing was mastered. A major change took place around 1980 when the 'planar' MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology developed in microelectronics was systematically applied also in detector construction. With the simultaneous introduction of matched readout chips this eventually would lead to pixelized matrix detectors that function as radiation imaging devices. The critical contributions to this revolution by Josef Kemmer and Paul Burger are described. Performance of the segmented planar technology detectors improved significantly in comparison with the earlier spectrometric diodes. With efficient industrial support the use of silicon detectors in many new applications has become possible and detector systems with a sensitive area of several tens to >100 m^2 have been constructed recently.