<title>Microfabrication of channel electron multipliers</title>

Abstract

Channel electron multipliers are vacuum-electron devices for detection of charged particles and energetic photons. Several manufacturing technologies for microelectronics and microelectromechanical systems hold significant promise for the development of a new generation of silicon-based channel electron multipliers with greater capabilities and broader applications than conventional glass-based ones. This paper describes several approaches to microfabrication of such devices using surface and bulk micromachining techniques. Results are presented for fully micromachined channel electron multipliers with signal gains in the range of 10-10.

The fabrication of nonplanar spin-on glass microstructures

“…A glass-drawing technique is commonly used in fabricating MCP's [2]. An MCP is Manuscript received October 29, 1997; revised December 20, 1998 an electron multiplier consisting of an array of millions of independent parallel microchannels, all fused together to form a rigid wafer-like structure (e.g., 25 mm round) [3]- [5]. MCP's are used in a wide variety of applications requiring positional detection and amplification of photons or charged particles [6], [7].…”