Silicon Buried Channels for Pixel Detector Cooling

The support and cooling structures add important contributions to the thickness, in radiation length, of vertex detectors. In order to minimize the material budget of pixel sensors, we developed a new approach to integrate the cooling into the silicon devices. The microchannels are formed in silicon using isotropic SF6 plasma etching in a DRIE (deep reactive ion etcher) equipment. Due to their peculiar profiles, the channels can be sealed by a layer of a PECVD silicon oxide. We have realized on a silicon wafer microchannels with different geometries and hydraulic diameters. We describe the main fabrication steps of microchannels with focus on the channel definition. The experimental results are reported on the thermal characterization of several prototypes, using a mixture of glycol and water as a liquid coolant. The prototypes have shown high cooling efficiency and high-pressure breaking strength.