Paper
9 July 1998 Enhancing back-illuminated performance of astronomical CCDs
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Abstract
Back illuminated CCDs have been the detectors of choice for most astronomical imagers and spectrographs during the past decade. In recent years, we have developed processes to improve the performance of these detectors. Recent work has resulted in improved absolute quantum efficiency (QE), QE stability with temperature, QE stability with environmental contamination, and enhanced near-IR response. We demonstrate that QE near 100% can be achieved which is stable against hydrogen, dewar outgassing, and water contamination. We show that QE decrease with temperature can be eliminated for blue/visible optimized CCDs using a backside passivation layer, and significantly reduced for UV optimized CCDs which require very thin backside films. We also show that a 20% QE increase at 900 nm can be obtained by coating the frontside of back illuminated CCDs with a reflective metal film, without increasing interference fringing.
© (1998) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Michael P. Lesser and Venkatraman Iyer "Enhancing back-illuminated performance of astronomical CCDs", Proc. SPIE 3355, Optical Astronomical Instrumentation, (9 July 1998); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.316776
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Cited by 31 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Charge-coupled devices

Quantum efficiency

Metals

Hydrogen

Coating

Silicon

Platinum

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