Despite their steady improvement over the last decades, the present ultraviolet (UV) detectors exhibit limitations inherent to their silicon technology. Yet, spatial resolution, temporal cadence, sensitivity, and photometric accuracy will be decisive when defining, operating, and exploiting forthcoming space missions, in particular in Solar Physics. The advent of novel wide bandgap materials (nitride, diamond) photodetectors or imagers would surmount many current weaknesses. It would enhance scientific capabilities and make the instruments cheaper. As for missions such as the ESA Solar Orbiter, the need is still more accute as the spacecraft will approach the Sun where the heat and the energetic particles fluxes are very high. An original UV detector development programme entitled BOLD (’Blind to the Optical Light Detectors’) is described in this web site. We report the progress made with the developped devices, and especially their modeling and optical characterization in terms of solarblindness, XUV-VUV sensitivity, etc.
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This movie and more can be found at the gallery of SOHO movies

Keywords: photodetector, BOLD, CMOS, APS, diamond, AlGaN, AlN, cBN, APS