Abstract

This is an introductory talk, slanted towards particle tracking, which comes to the possibly controversial conclusion that the new family of charge-coupled CMOS pixel imagers is likely to emerge as the technology of choice for many tracking systems where minimising the material budget is important, over the next decade. This will require the evolution to multi-gigapixel systems, but that is already happening in astronomy. The yield of very thin wafer-scale devices is expected to be high.