Characterization of Prototype LSST CCDs

The ambitious science goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be achieved in part by a wide-field imager that will achieve a new level of performance in terms of area, speed, and sensitivity. The instrument performance is dominated by the focal plane sensors, which are now in development. These new-generation sensors will make use of advanced semiconductor technology and will be complemented by a highly integrated electronics package located inside the cryostat. A test laboratory has been set up at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to characterize prototype sensors and to develop test and assembly techniques for eventual integration of production sensors and electronics into modules that will form the final focal plane. As described in [1], the key requirements for LSST sensors are wideband quantum efficiency (QE) extending beyond lpm in the red, control of point spread function (PSF), and fast readout using multiple amplifiers per chip operated in parallel. In addition, LSST's fast optical system (f71.25) places severe constraints on focal plane flatness. At the chip level this involves packaging techniques to minimize warpage of the silicon die, and at the mosaic level careful assembly and metrology to achieve a high coplanarity of the sensor tiles. In view of the long lead time to develop the needed sensor technology, LSST undertook a study program with several vendors to fabricate and test devices which address the most critical performance features [2]. The remainder of this paper presents key results of this study program. Section 2 summarizes the sensor requirements and the results of design optimization studies, and Section 3 presents the sensor development plan. In Section 4 we describe the test bench at BNL. Section 5 reports measurement results obtained to date oh devices fabricated by several vendors. Section 6 presents a summary of the paper and an outlook for the future work. We present characterization methods and results on a number of new devices produced specifically to address LSST's performance goals, including flatness, QE, PSF, dark current, read noise, CTE, cosmetics, and crosstalk. The results indicate that commercially produced, thick n-channel over-depleted CCDs with excellent red response can achieve tight PSF at moderate applied substrate bias with no evidence of persistent image artifacts. We will also report ongoing studies of mosaic assembly techniques to achieve chip-to-chip co-planarity, high fill factor, and thermal stability