Electrical crosstalk in front-illuminated photodiode array with different guard ring designs for medical CT applications

This paper presents electrical crosstalk studies on front-illuminated photodiode arrays for medical computed tomography (CT) applications. Crosstalk is an important factor to the system noise and image quality. The electrical crosstalk depends on silicon substrate properties and photodiode structures. The photodiode samples employed in this paper are planar processed on high-resistivity n-type silicon substrate, resulting in a p+/n−/n+ diode structure. Two types of guard ring structures are designed and applied to the same geometry of two-dimensional photodiode arrays. One structure is an n guard ring in the gap area between pixels, and the other structure is an additional p+ guard ring around each pixel together with the n guard ring. A 10 μm light spot with wavelength of 525 nm is used to scan across the surface of the photodiode array in the electrical crosstalk measurements. The electrical currents of two neighbor pixels are measured and the results are compared between two guard ring designs. The design with the p+ guard ring structure gives better electrical crosstalk suppression. Moreover, the measurement results show much smaller influence on surrounding pixels with the p+ guard ring structure in the case of disconnected pixel. Besides the electrical crosstalk, the light sensitivity within the gap area is also discussed between two guard ring designs.