New trends in silicon detector technology

Modern detector science and technology has originated from High Energy Physics experiment needs in the '80's of the past century, based on the achievement and knowledge of the silicon industry of the time. The first segmented array of diodes (a microstrip sensor) was developed to track vertices at the NA11 experiment at the SPS accelerator at CERN (Geneva, CH) . During the following years, detector technology developed into a special branch of the huge silicon technology enterprise that has been arguably the biggest contributor to the evolution of most of the economical, social and scientific activities of mankind. If, and how, detector technology for science has kept the pace with the spectacular speed of evolution of mainstream silicon technology (namely, the microelectronics industry) is the object of this paper, that will also point out the special requirements of detectors for science and how these can be linked to modern microelectronics trends.