Digital switch boards for IV and CV measurements of large-array Low Gain Avalanche Detectors

The High-Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD), with a time resolution of approximately 30 ps, is proposed for the ATLAS Phase II upgrade to address the challenge of greatly increased pile-up interactions. The HGTD is based on the technology of Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs). The current–voltage (IV) and capacitance–voltage (CV) measurements are important methods to study the main characteristics that can be exploited for quality controlling LGADs during production. A single probe can be controlled via computer to switch channels when using an automatic probe station, but this leaves the remaining, adjacent channels floating and results in inaccurate measurements due to the punch-through effect. We designed the digital switch boards for the IV and CV measurements of 5 × 5 and 15 × 15 LGADs arrays. With the digital switch board and probe cards, channels on a large-array LGADs can be scanned automatically during the measurement, which greatly improves the measurement efficiency. The results show that the leakage currents and noise of all channels induced by the two digital switch boards are lower than 10 pA. We show the IV and CV curves of all channels on two LGADs from Hamamatsu Photonics K. K. (HPK) with our digital switch boards. Compared with the results measured by HPK with an automatic probe station, the IV and CV curves that we measured have better uniformity and accuracy, demonstrating that the quality control of the large-array LGADs can be conducted well with our digital switch board.