Impact of metal overhang and guard ring techniques on breakdown voltage of Si strip sensors - 2003 IEEE nuclear science symposium, medical imaging conference, and workshop of room-temperature semiconductor detectors

The importance of Si sensors in high-energy physics (HEP) experiments can hardly be overemphasized. However, the high luminosity and the high radiation level in the future HEP experiments, like Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has posed a serious challenge to the fabrication of Si detectors. For the safe operation over the full LHC lifetime, detectors are required to sustain very high voltage operation, well exceeding the bias voltage needed to full deplete the heavily irradiated Si sensors. Thus, the main effort in the development of Si sensors is concentrated on a design that avoids p-n junction breakdown at operational biases. Among various proposed techniques, Field-limiting Ring (FLR) (or guard ring) and Metal-Overhang (MO) are technologically simple and are suitable for vertical devices. Since high-voltage planar Si junctions are of great importance in the HEP experiments, it is very interesting to compare these two aforementioned techniques for achieving the maximum breakdown voltage under optimal conditions. In the present work, the breakdown performance of metal-overhang and field-limiting ring techniques is compared for various values of junction depth and fixed oxide charge under similar conditions using two dimensional device simulation program TMA-MEDICI. (10 refs).