Development of CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors for the ALICE-ITS Outer Barrel and for the CBM-MVD

After more than a decade of R&D;, CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS or CPS) have proven to offer concrete answers to the demanding requirements of subatomic physics experi- ments. Their main advantages result from their low material budget, their very high granularity and their integrated signal processing circuitry, which allows coping with high particle rates. Moreover, they offer a valuable radiation tolerance and may be produced at low cost. Sensors of the MIMOSA series have offered an opportunity for nuclear and particle physics exper- iments to address with improved sensitivity physics studies requiring an accurate reconstruction of short living and soft particles. One of their major applications is the STAR-PXL detector, which is the first vertex detector based on MAPS. While this experiment is successfully taking data since two years, it was found that the 0.35 m CMOS technology used for this purpose is not suited for upcoming applications like the CBM micro-vertex detector (MVD) and the ALICE inner tracking system (ITS), which require faster and more radiation tolerant sensors. The exploration of a deeper submicron CMOS technology was therefore initiated. It was shown that MAPS can be envisaged for detectors exposed to running conditions significantly more severe than those of the STAR-PXL. We report on major results obtained with this R&D; and discuss our strategy toward the fabrication of sensors for the ALICE-ITS and the CBM-MVD