A 3456 element quadrilinear CCD with depletion-isolated sensor structure

In order to realize a high resolution CCD line imager, a novel quadrilinear CCD read-out structure was designed, allowing a sensor pitch of 8 µm or even 6 µm. To take full advantage of this new read-out scheme which doubles sensor density compared to bilinear read-out, a new very simple but efficient sensor structure was implemented, consisting of photodiodes which are only separated from each other by the depletion region of the p-n junctions. Theoretical performance limits of this sensor will be presented together with experimental results obtained on 1728 and 3456 element quadrilinear CCD´s.