A single-chip receiver for pulsed laser direct time-of-flight 3-D imaging applications has been realized in a 0.35-µm HV CMOS technology. The chip includes a 32 × 128 single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array [35% fill factor (FF)] and 257 time-to-digital converters (TDCs) with a ∼78-ps resolution. Two adjacent rows (2 × 128 SPADs) at a time can be selected for simultaneous measurement, i.e., 16 measurement cycles are needed to cover the whole array. SPADs are capable of operating in a gated mode in order to suppress dark and background light-induced detections. The IC was designed to be used in a solid-state 3-D imaging system with laser illumination concentrated in both time (short sub-ns pulses) and space (targeting only the active rows of the SPAD array). The performance of the receiver IC was characterized in a solid-state 3-D range imager with flood-pulsed illumination from a laser diode (LD)-based transmitter, which produced short [∼150ps full-width at half-maximum (FWHM)] high-energy (∼3.8-nJ pulse/∼14-W peak power) pulses at a pulsing rate of 250 kHz when operating at a wavelength of 810 nm. Two detector/TDC ICs formed an 8k pixel receiver, targeting a field-of-view of ∼42 • ×21 • by means of simple optics. Frame rates of up to 20 fps were demonstrated with a centimeter-level precision in the case of Lambertian targets within a range of 3.5 m. Index Terms-3-D imager, CMOS, direct time-of-flight (dTOF), single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD), solid state, time gating, time-to-digital converter (TDC).

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A 3D imaging concept based on pulsed time-of-flight focal plane imaging is presented which can be tailored flexibly in terms of performance parameters such as range, image update rate, field-of-view, 2D resolution, depth accuracy, etc. according to the needs of different applications. The transmitter is based on a laser diode operating in enhanced gain-switching mode with a simple MOS/CMOS-switch current driver and capable of producing short (~100ps FWHM) high energy (up to nJ) pulses at a high pulsing rate. The receiver consists of 2D SPAD and TDC arrays placed on the same die, but in separate arrays. Paraxial optics can be used to illuminate the target field-of-view with the receiver placed at the focal plane of the receiver lens. To validate the concept, a prototype system is presented with a bulk laser diode/MOS driver operating at a wavelength of 870nm with a pulsing rate of 100kHz as the transmitter and a single-chip 9x9 SPAD array with 10-channel TDC as the receiver. The possibility of using this method as a solid-state solution to the task of 3D imaging is discussed in the light of the results derived from this prototype.

The relation between signal and background noise strengths in single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD)-based pulsed time-of-flight 3-D range imaging is analyzed on the assumption that the SPAD detector is operating in the single photon detection mode. Several practical measurement cases using a 256-pixel solid-state pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) line profiler are presented and analyzed in the light of the resulting analysis. It is shown that in this case it is advantageous to concentrate the available optical average power in short, intensive pulses and to focus the optical energy in spatial terms. In 3-D range imaging, this could be achieved by using block-based illumination instead of the regularly used flood illumination. One modification of this approach could be a source that would illuminate the system FOV only in narrow laser stripes. It is shown that a 256-pixel SPAD-based pulsed TOF line profiler following these design principles can achieve a measurement range of 5–10 m to non-cooperative targets at a rate of ~10 lines/s under bright sunlight conditions using an average optical power of only 260 µW.

As the distance between neighboring devices in large CMOS single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays is reduced for improving the density, increased crosstalk becomes an important issue, limiting the maximum practical fill factor of the array. In this study, the temporal correlation of crosstalk events, as well as the crosstalk probability, and their dependence on parameters, such as the illumination wavelength and intensity, and the distance between SPADs, are investigated via measurement of a ~45%-fill factor CMOS SPAD array fabricated using 0.35-µm high-voltage CMOS technology. The SPADs have 24 µm × 24 µm square-shaped active areas, and all devices share a common deep-N-well cathode. On-chip time-to-digital converters with 65-ps resolution are used to measure the timing of crosstalk events in "coincidence measurements." For the crosstalk measurements, the internal noise in one SPAD is used to produce crosstalk events in the neighboring devices. The measurement results indicate both optical and electrical crosstalk with the crosstalk events, having a specific temporal distribution. The crosstalk probability in the first two adjacent pixels is found to be 0.3% and 0.01%, with a distribution having full widths at half maximum (FWHMs) of 700 and 400 ps, respectively. In pulsed time-of-flight measurements, when one SPAD is triggered with external short-pulsed (FWHM of approximately 200 ps) illumination, extra correlated noise in the adjacent SPADs added to the crosstalk noise, increasing the correlated noise considerably. This additional noise was a secondary effect of the absorbed laser photons deep in the substrate.