Today’s optical range finders or 3D imagers suffer from significant drawbacks and do not allow to combine performance (sensitivity, precision) with simplicity, and scalability enabling very-large scale integration with minimum footprint. Here, we present the amorphous silicon Intrinsic Photomixing Detector (IPD) for direct and highly sensitive optical envelope mixing. The ability to generate a photocurrent that is proportional to the nonlinear mixing of two optical modulation envelope functions enables high performance Time-of-Flight optical ranging at low light levels down to $$\sim \!0.1\,{{{{{\rm{mW}}}}}}{{{{{\rm{cm}}}}}}^{-2}$$
~
0.1
mW
cm
−
2
at $$444\,{{{{{\rm{nm}}}}}}$$
444
nm
. The IPD exceeds MHz bandwidth, covers a broad distance detection range from $$10\,{{{{{\rm{cm}}}}}}$$
10
cm
to $$101\,{{{{{\rm{m}}}}}}$$
101
m
, and achieves a mean depth resolution below $$44\,{{{{{\rm{mm}}}}}}$$
44
mm
for distances up to $$25\,{{{{{\rm{m}}}}}}$$
25
m
. The IPD paves the way towards simple but high-performance photodetectors that allow for very-large scale integration on top of silicon or flexible electronics at low costs with pixel fill factors up to 100%.