BIPOLAR FLOATING-BASE CHARGE DETECTOR USED AS CCD OUTPUT STRUCTURE

A bipolar charge detector based on the floating-surface detector conce pt and called a floating-base detector is presented. The floating-base detector has been fabricated in a standard CCD (charge-coupled device ) image-sensor process. It can be used as an output structure for CCD registers or as a compact pixel-gain element. The floating-base detect or, with a charge handling capability of 30000 electrons, has achieved a dynamic range of 84 dB over a 5 MHz bandwidth, which corresponds to a noise-electron equivalent of 1.9 electrons.