An Integrated Laser Radar Receiver Channel with Wide Dynamic Range

Abstract

A Receiver channel for a pulsed time-of-flight laser rangefinder is presented. It operates in a wide dynamic range without gain control. This is achieved by using leading edge detection and the generated walk error is corrected by measuring the slew rate of the pulse. In this way the compensation can be continued after the pulse is clipped so that the residual walk error can be minimized. Simulations show that a single-shot precision of 125 ps, or 20 mm in distance, is achievable within a dynamic range of at least 1:10,000.

A 700 MHz laser radar receiver realized in 0.18 μm HV-CMOS

“…Low jitter enables to achieve a very accurate single-shot precision when leading edge detection is used. The walk error can be compensated either by using the slew rate or pulse width measurement based method presented in [31] and [32], respectively or both methods [33]. Table 1 shows the performance summary of the proposed receiver chip in comparison with some recently published works.…”