Design and testing of an innovative slim-edge termination for silicon radiation detectors

Silicon detectors with reduced or no dead volume along the edges have been attracting a lot of interest in the past few years in many different fields. High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments are demanding this feature to ease the assembly of the innermost tracking layers, where space and material budget are usually a concern. At the same time, other applications like X-Ray imaging, are starting to use matrixes of silicon detectors to cover increasingly larger areas and, in order to do so in a seamless way, minimum edge extension is required. In this paper we report on the design and testing of a new edge termination for silicon 3D detectors able to reduce the edge extension to about 50 um without increasing the fabrication complexity. In addition, the same edge termination can also be applied to planar detectors with little additional process complexity