The attractiveness of electron beam systems would be greatly enhanced if the throughput could be improved. One approach, described previously by the authors employs a uniform axial magnetic field to focus thousands of electron beams simultaneously [D. S. Pickard , J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 21, 2709 (2003); T. R. Groves and R. A. Kendall, ibid., 16, 3168 (1998)]. The beamlets never combine to form a common crossover, thereby avoiding the throughput limitations due to space charge blurring. With this approach, one challenge was to fashion a detection scheme that maintains a tight beamlet packing density (250 mu m pitch) while minimizing cross-talk between adjacent secondary electron signals, either by crossing trajectories or within the detector. A pin-diode-based detector was investigated as a potential component of the multielement detection scheme for the authors' system. The detector features a two-dimensional array of elements on high resistivity float-zone silicon. The detector attributes that were attractive to their application include modest internal amplification (>5000 at 25 kV), fast response time (measured at < 10 ns), ability to be made compact and with dense packed electrodes (< 250 mu m), low electrode capacitance (< 1 pF), and ability for (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuitry to be integrated directly onto the detector array so that low noise amplification of each signal can be performed. This detector requires a retarding field for the primary beam, which accelerates the secondary electrons to energies sufficient to excite a large number of internal secondaries. (c) 2007 American Vacuum Society.