Solid state thermal neutron detectors are desired to replace the current ~3He tube based technology, which has some issues with stability, sensitivity to microphonics and very recently a shortage in ~3He. There have been several solid state thermal neutron detector concepts developed recently. Our approach is based on the combination of high aspect ratio silicon PIN diodes surrounded by ~(10)B, the neutron converter material. Etching high aspect ratio pillar structures into silicon produces a device that can efficiently absorb the thermal neutrons because of a large volume of 10B within the pillar array. The charged particles generated by the thermal neutron - 10B reaction are detected in the PIN diodes by spacing the pillars to optimize reaction product collection efficiency. In this paper, preliminary results indicate that our device can withstand a certain amount of neutron and gamma fluence without deterioration of detector’s performance.
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