The first back-side illuminated types of Kyoto's X-ray astronomy SOIPIX

We have been developing Kyoto's X-ray astronomy SOI pixel sensors, called "XRPIX", aiming to extend the frontiers of X-ray astronomy with the wide-band imaging spectroscopy in the 0.5-40 keV band. A dead layer on the X-ray incident surface should ideally be as thin as possible to achieve a high sensitivity below 1 keV, and the depletion layer is required to be thick enough to detect 40 keV X-rays. Thus, we have started developing fully-depleted back-side illuminated (BI) types of XRPIXs. This paper reports on our first two BI devices and their X-ray evaluation (2.6-12 keV). The device named "XRPIX2b-FZ-LA" successfully reaches a full depletion with a thickness of 500 pm. On the other hand, it has a dead layer with a thickness of 1.1-1.5 mu m and struggles to achieve the requirement of 1.0 mu m. The other device named "XRPIX2b-CZ-PZ", which is applied with a thin Si sensor-layer and an improved back-side process, is found to satisfy the requirement with its thickness of 0.9-1.0 mu m, including Al optical blocking filter of 0.2 mu m, although the Si sensor-layer is rather thin with 62 mu m. We also describe in this paper the X-ray calibration system that we have built for the X-ray evaluation of XRPIXs. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.