In M. Sufferts article, Silicon photodiode readout of scintillators and associated electronics, a description of PIN-type photodiodes is first explained.

These types of photodiodes are made of very pure n-type silicon which has a high resistivity. These PIN photodiodes resist breakdown very well and can therefore be operated with a reversed bias voltage, allowing the p/n junction to be fully depleted after each exposure. PIN photodiodes have a very short response time (on the order of nanoseconds), and have a response that is linear over many decades of light intensity. These intrinsic qualities of photodiodes are important due to the fact that many modern detectors use these photodiodes in very inaccessible locations, and so must be reliable and have a low failure rate, as modern photodiodes do. A drawback of photodiodes when compared to phototubes is that they have high quantum efficiency, but are small, so they do not possess the internal amplification that the many dynodes within a phototube provide. At low energies, therefore, the resolution in photodiodes is determined by the level of electronic noise. This electronic noise is reduced in several ways. One way is through the use of a charge-sensitive preamplifier followed by a shaping amplifier, which has a time constant . The equivalent noise charge is a measure of the equivalent charge fluctuations at the input of the preamplifier which would produce the observed noise at the output of the shaping amplifier (524). To lower the ENC is to decrease the total capacitance, which is the sum of the junction capacitance of the photodiode and the input capacitance of the preamplifier. Ways to decrease the junction capacitance include increasing the thickness of the silicon wafer, use drift photodiodes, or use silicon avalanche photodiodes, which allow a large decrease in electronic noise, but maintain the high quantum efficiency of silicon. In the use of scintillators with photodiodes, CsI(Tl) scintillators have qualities that lend themselves particularly well to the use of photodiodes for readout. In general, slow inorganic scintillators have a large decay time constant, and therefore spread the total charge delivered by