Simultaneous Irradiation and Testing for Radiation Damage Evaluation in Actively Biased SiPMs and Other Devices

A portable opto-electronic device test bench together with a neutron irradiation setup at Reactor Argentino 1 (RA-1) facility in Buenos Aires (Argentina) is presented. The irradiation with neutrons is performed to reproduce the expected damage the devices would experience while operating in outer space. Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) have been irradiated in this setup with an Am-Be source while measurements of key parameters have been taken to better evaluate the damage progression. The objective of this irradiation setup is to expose SiPMs or any other electronic device to neutron doses equivalent to those encountered during an entire space-borne mission, with the additional feature of irradiating while the devices operate in a more similar operating condition than the final application in terms of biasing or any other environmental variable. As the irradiation degrades the silicon lattice of the devices, damage is observed through the increment of dark current due to the increase in thermal dark pulses generated by the lattice imperfections. Preliminary results obtained from a Hamamatsu S13552-10 128-channels SiPM array, irradiated and measured concurrently, also show some step changes in dark current while irradiating instead of only smooth increments. These results are presented to demonstrate the functionality and some of the capabilities of the test and irradiation setup described.