Speaker: Chris Leitz (Lincoln Laboratory) 
Advances in Charge-Coupled Devices at MIT Lincoln Laboratory
 
Silicon charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are commonly utilized for scientific imaging applications in the visible, near infrared, and soft X-ray bands.  These devices offer numerous advantages including excellent uniformity, low read noise, noiseless on-chip charge summation, high energy resolution in the soft X-ray band, and flight heritage.  While CCDs are relatively mature, they continue to improve and evolve to support new applications for astronomy and national security.  In this talk, we discuss three new areas of CCD development at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  We first present simplifications to the CCD fabrication process, replacing three or more poly-silicon layers with a single poly-silicon film patterned by precision photolithography, aimed at reducing fabrication time, improving yield, and supporting even larger format imaging devices.  We next discuss development of wafer-scale direct bonding processes to enable molecular-beam epitaxial passivation of backside-illuminated silicon CCDs for applications in the soft X-ray and ultraviolet bands.  Finally, we review our progress in fabricating CCDs on bulk germanium to cover an even broader spectral range (including the hard X-ray and short-wave infrared bands), presenting analysis of charge-transfer efficiency and plans to scale existing small pixel arrays to larger formats.