Low noise photon-counting pixel detectors

The base-line noise measured with Bioquant1.

The low-noise pixel detectors can applied in many fields. One example is the detection of the fluorescence light in cell- and gene-research. The scaling of the CMOS technologies acts in favour of this development. The input-referred noise of a CMOS detector is roughly proportional to the detector capacitance. On the other hand, small diodes with a small number of dopant atoms in the depleted region have small capacitances. The use of the sub-micrometer size diodes can allow for the construction of the detectors with the input-referred noise below one electron. This can allow the detection of single photons in the visible energy range without the need for avalanche signal multiplication.