Geometry dependence of dark current in CCD´s

This paper studies the scalability of dark current in reduced-geometry CCD´s. The dependence of dark current on device geometry is measured from test CCD´s with various channel widths. We found that dark current does not scale with channel width due to the peripheral leakage generated at the edges of the channel stops. A simple model is proposed to separate the peripheral contribution from the leakage generated within the CCD cell. It is concluded that the peripheral contribution becomes a dominant leakage source in narrow-channel CCD´s, and the bucket fill time decreases as the channel width is reduced.