Development and characterization of 16-channel silicon photomultiplier prototype with sub-mm pixels for high-resolution PET system

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are one of the most promising photodetectors for high-resolution PET systems because of their high gain and fast rise time. The resolution of a modern animal PET scanner is now in the sub-mm range; it has also been reported that an individual readout for pixels is necessary in order to achieve the theoretically best resolution. For achieving sub-mm resolution, a detector with pixelated crystals individually coupled to the photodetector is ideal. To this end, a prototype 16-channel SiPM with a pitch of 500μm was designed and fabricated, and its characteristics were studied. Several parameters, such as dark count rate (DCR), gain, crosstalk, and photon detection efficiency (PDE) are characterized in this study. The developed SiPM shows the performance required for future PET detector application.