Continuous measurement of radiation damage of standard CMOS imagers

In this work we have irradiated a standard CMOS VGA imager with a 24 MeV proton beam at INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, up to a nominal fluence of 1014 protons/cm2. The device under test was fabricated with a 130 nm technology without radiation hardening. During the damaging the detector was fully operational to monitor the progressive damaging of the sensor and the associated on-pixel electronics in terms of detection efficiency, charge collection and noise. We found that the detector is still working at 1013 protons/cm2, with a moderate increase of the noise (20%).