Advancements and applications of monolithic pixel detector

Monolithic pixel detectors, which combine sensor and readout on a single silicon chip, are gaining popularity as tracking detectors in high-energy physics. They have made significant progress in recent years and have been successfully implemented in STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) and ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). They are fabricated using commercial CMOS technologies and normally undergo some process modification to boost their sensor performance. They offer advantages in detector capacitance, material budget, assembling effort, and total cost over conventional hybrid structures. Similar to commercial ASICs, their process feature size tends to decrease to improve time and spatial detection resolution, readout and computing speed, and power consumption in high-energy physics applications. This paper will provide an overview of monolithic active pixel sensors and their applications. Important aspects of developments will be summarized with some new technologies and innovative readout architectures.