Microstructured Scintillator for X-ray Imaging

Development of production fabrication process. Scint-X develops and manufactures microstructured scintillator plates that allow sensitive detection combined with a minimal amount of lateral light scattering that deteriorates the image quality. This is done by channeling the light through the plate on its way to the CMOS or CCD array, thus avoiding cross-talk between pixels. The process involves etching columnar holes into a silicon wafer, and filling with a scintillator material. We use the deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) for this. It is a plasma-etching technique that enables the etching of trenches and holes in semiconductor material with straight sidewalls and a high level of design freedom. Very thin sidewalls, with smooth surfaces is required to get good X-ray sensitivity.

Results Deep Reactive Etching (DRIE) of 200 µm deep pores in silicon filled with scintillator material.

Start 2008-12-01 

Project leader Tommy Schönberg

Project partners Scint-X, KTH

Project sponsors Vinnova

Publications