Abstract

A charge-coupled device, or CCD as it is more commonly known, is a oneor two-dimensional semiconductor (almost always silicon) detector. A CCD comprises a number of sensing elements or pixels, arranged in a regular array. The number of pixels is in the hundreds or thousands for linear (1D) devices and tens of thousands to millions for area (2D) devices. Pixel sizes vary from a few microns to a few tens of microns resulting in 2D devices with areas up to several square centimeters (Figure 5.1).