Compact active quenching circuit for fast photon counting with avalanche photodiodes

Abstract

Actively quenched singlephoton avalanche diode for high repetition rate timegated photon counting Rev.A compact and flexible circuit for operating avalanche photodiodes in Geiger mode was designed, fabricated, and tested. A new voltage driver stage, based on fast n-channel double-diffused metaloxide-semiconductor ͑DMOS͒ transistors in a bootstrap configuration, makes it possible to obtain quenching pulses up to 25 V amplitude and fast active reset of the detector. At 20 V excess bias voltage above the photodiode breakdown level, an overall deadtime shorter than 36 ns is attained. The avalanche pulse charge is minimized by means of a mixed passive-active quenching approach, thus reducing self-heating and afterpulsing effects in the photodiode. A user-controllable hold-off time is available for further reducing the afterpulsing effect. The saturated counting rate of the circuit exceeds 25 Mcounts/s, but, by working with avalanche photodiodes with high breakdown voltage ͑250-400 V͒ and high avalanche current ͑10-40 mA͒, a practical limit is set at about 9 Mcounts/s by thermal effects in the detector. Gated-detector operation with gate times down to 10 ns is provided. The suitability of the new active-quenching circuit for the development of compact, all-solid-state instruments for high-performance photon counting was verified in experimental tests.

Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory

“…20,21 To aid in focusing, each detector was mounted on standard optical mounting posts and a 30 mm "cage" assembly was attached to hold the lens and RG780 filter. These are described in section III.…”

Geiger Avalanche Photodiodes (G-APDs) and Their Characterization

“…This works to a given extent; however, another problem sets in, namely afterpulsing, due to charge carriers trapped within the semiconductor during the avalanche signal and later exponentially released. Cooling the device results in an increase of the exponential decay constant, and therefore, the lowest operating temperature becomes a tradeoff between random thermal counts and long-lasting afterpulse counts (Ghioni et al, 1996). This could represent an intrinsic limitation to the implementation of large-area G-APD detectors, if one actually needs the single photon sensitivity.…”

“…In fact, it was the introduction of the active-quenching circuit (AQC) concept by S. Cova (Cova et al, 1981) that opened the way to practical application of SPADs. Many AQC types have since been reported, with circuit structure and mounting that evolved from standard NIM cards (Brown et al, 1987) to small SMT boards suitable for compact detector modules (Ghioni et al, 1996). But, if some limitation on photon counting rate and on timing response is accepted then, by using quenching resistors, many SPADs can be easily integrated in one chip and a so called multi-element G-APD can be manufactured with sensitive areas comparable to those of small photomultiplier tubes.…”

Single photon avalanche detectors: prospects of new quenching and gain mechanisms

“…Besides dark count, the singlephoton detection efficiency (SPDE) is limited by the afterpulsing effect, by which trapped carriers escape from trap states and initiate avalanche pulses in the absence of an incident signal, giving rise to false counts. SPADs, which operate as a two-state system [11] with binary-like output response, also have no photon number resolving capability. Thus, one cannot reliably determine the photon number of input signal from the magnitude of the output response.…”