e2v has delivered over 150 CCDs for Gaia, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission due to launch in 2012. Gaia’s goal is to map the positions, parallaxes and movement across the sky of around 1 billion objects in our galaxy. The Gaia focal plane will be the largest ever developed, with 106 CCDs, a total of almost 1 Gigapixels and physical dimensions of 0.5m × 1m.
The e2v CCD91-72 is 3 sided buttable, to minimise the dead space between CCDs when they are tiled together in the mosaic. All CCDs have been through e2v’s back thinning process, so not only this array is the largest, it's also BSI.
Via Electrons and Holes blog.
Maybe with advances in TSV technology there will someday be a CMOS version of this system made with four-sided buttable chips. Or with Lego bricks.
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