Long-term stability of scientific X-ray CMOS detectors

Abstract

In recent years, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) sensors have been demonstrated to have significant potential in X-ray astronomy, where long-term reliability is crucial for space X-ray telescopes. This study examines the long-term stability of a scientific CMOS sensor, focusing on its bias, dark current, readout noise, and X-ray spectral performance. The sensor was initially tested at -30 ${}^{\circ }$C for 16 months, followed by accelerated aging at 20 ${}^{\circ }$C. After a total aging period of 610 days, the bias map, dark current, readout noise, gain, and energy resolution exhibited no observable degradation. There are less than 50 pixels within the 4 k $\times$ 4 k array which show a decrease of the bias under 50 ms integration time by over 10 digital numbers (DNs). First-order kinetic fitting of the gain evolution predicts a gain degeneration of 0.73% over 3 years and 2.41% over 10 years. These results underscore the long-term reliability of CMOS sensors for application in space missions.

17 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (3)

• X-ray performance of a customized large-format scientifc CMOS detector
• Improving the X-ray energy resolution of a scientific CMOS detector by pixel-level gain correction
• Investigating the image lag of a scientific CMOS sensor in X-ray detection