Room-temperature semiconductor device and array configurations

The use of high atomic number, room-temperature semiconductors for radiation detectors always involves making compromises to optimize the performance for specific applications. In recent years, a number of sophisticated device configurations and a variety of new read-out methods have been developed to extract the desired information from the detector signal. These approaches have significantly mitigated the effects of the inherent deficiencies found in available materials and have opened the way for promising new applications. The benefits of such approaches and their limitations are reviewed for CdTe and Cd1−xZnxTe (CZT) devices.