The recent R & D focus on CMOS sensors with charge collection in a depleted zone has opened new perspectives for CMOS sensors as fast and radiation hard pixel devices. These sensors, labelled as depleted CMOS sensors (DMAPS), have already shown promising performance as feasible candidates for the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk) upgrade, possibly replacing the current passive sensors. A further step to exploit the potential of DMAPS is to investigate the suitability of equipping the outer layers of the ATLAS ITk upgrade with fully monolithic CMOS sensors. This paper presents the development of a depleted monolithic CMOS pixel sensor designed in the LFoundry 150 nm CMOS technology, with the focus on design details and simulation results.

This work presents a depleted monolithic active pixel sensor (DMAPS) prototype manufactured in the LFoundry 150 nm CMOS process. DMAPS exploit high voltage and/or high resistivity inclusion of modern CMOS technologies to achieve substantial depletion in the sensing volume. The described device, named LF-Monopix, was designed as a proof of concept of a fully monolithic sensor capable of operating in the environment of outer layers of the ATLAS Inner Tracker upgrade in 2025 for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). This type of devices has a lower production cost and lower material budget compared to presently used hybrid designs. In this work, the chip architecture will be described followed by the characterization of the different preamplifier and discriminator flavors with an external injection signal and an iron source (5.9 keV x-rays).