Marc Dandin

Hunter Guthrie, Md Sakibur Sajal, Zexi Liu et al.

Perimeter-gated single-photon avalanche diodes (pg-SPADs) are known for their dynamic dark noise modulation capabilities. They are reported to trade noise for photon sensitivity under continuous illumination. However, the implications of this trade-off have not heretofore been studied with pulsed optical systems. This work bridges this gap. We demonstrate that pg-SPADs fabricated in a 0.35 $μ$m standard CMOS process trade-off pulse detection efficiency for a reduction in the the spread of spurious events within a burst window. Consequently, herein, we propose guidelines for the optimal use of pg-SPADs in pulsed LIDAR applications in view of the observed trade-off.

Md Sakibur Sajal, Hunter Guthrie, Zexi Liu et al.

Direct time of flight (dToF) measurements are susceptible to errors because of system-level and circuit-level timing jitters. In addition, device-level uncertainty stemming from the dark noise of single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) contributes to the aggregated error. We demonstrate that perimeter gating can help reduce the device-level detection inaccuracy for SPAD devices by reducing the dark noise probability. Specifically, in this work, we developed a general framework to accurately estimate the dToF jitters stemming from different source levels and analyzed a counter-based time to digital converter (TDC) circuit that are commonly used in such systems. We have also measured dToFs using a perimeter-gated SPAD (pg-SPAD) detector fabricated in a 0.35 $μ$m standard CMOS process. Experimental results show that pg-SPADs can improve measurement accuracy in both free-running and time-gated operations.