PROJECT TITLE :

A 2-GHz Bandwidth, Integrated Transimpedance Amplifier for Single-Photon Timing Applications

ABSTRACT:

In recent years, single-photon timing techniques have been used in an exceedingly steadily increasing number of applications. Most of those applications require high detector performance in terms of noise, photon detection efficiency, time resolution, and number of pixels operating in parallel. The detectors best fitting these requirements are single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays engineered in custom technology, though the systems based on such detectors are restricted to a couple pixels. In this paper, we have a tendency to gift a unique read-out circuit, developed in an exceedingly 0.18- m high voltage-CMOS technology, for the detection of the SPAD avalanche current: the designed circuit is predicated on a a pair of.two-GHz bandwidth integrated transimpedance amplifier, followed by a low-pass filter, to scale back crosstalk, and by an integrated comparator. The choose-up circuit has a total power dissipation of one.1 mW, occupies an overall space of 1550zero and shows a time resolution down to forty eight ps and a negligible crosstalk between two different pixels. All these options will open the approach to the event of large SPAD arrays, characterised by a performance comparable with that of the only-pixel structures. Moreover, the good agreement between the simulated and therefore the measured resolution (with a fourteen% maximum error) makes the future improvement of the evaluated performance attainable.