Construction and characterization of a 117 cm/sup 2/ silicon pixel detector

A silicon pixel detector, developed in RD19, and consisting of 4 planes, /spl sim/30 cm/sup 2/ each, is operating for the first time in the lead ion experiment WA97 at CERN. The 288 CMOS readout chips are bump-bonded to 48 Si detector matrices, assembled in 8 identical arrays. The total number of pixel cells is nearly 300000 and each cell, 75 /spl mu/m/spl times/500 /spl mu/m, contains a complete signal processing chain. Overall dead area is less than 3%.<
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