High-speed bridge circuit for InGaAs avalanche photodiode single-photon detector

Abstract

Because of low power consumption and small footprint, avalanche photodiodes (APD) have been commonly applied to photon detection. Recently, high speed quantum communication has been demonstrated for high bit-rate quantum key distribution. For the high speed quantum communication, photon detectors should operate at GHz-clock frequencies. We propose balanced detection circuits for GHz-clock operation of InGaAs-APD photon detectors. The balanced single photon detector operates with sinusoidal wave gating. The sinusoidal wave appearing in the output is removed by the subtraction from APD signal without sharp band-elimination filters. Omission of the sharp filters removes the constraint on the operating frequency of the single photon detector. We present two designs, one works with two identical APDs, the other with one APD and a low-pass filter. The sinusoidal gating enables to eliminate the gating noise even with the simple configuration of the latter design. We demonstrated the balanced single photon detector operating with 1.020GHz clock at 233 K, 193 K, and 186.5 K. The dark count probability was 4.0 x 10 -4 counts/pulse with the quantum efficiency of 10% at 233K, and 1.6 x 10 -4 counts/pulse at 186.5 K. These results were obtained with easily available APDs (NR8300FP-C.C, RENESASS) originally developed for optical time-domain reflectmeters.

Saturated detection efficiency of single-photon detector based on an InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode gated with a large-amplitude sinusoidal voltage

“…We also tried to cancel the transferred gate signal using a π-hybrid junction (PJCT). 17,18) The RF phase control to cancel the transferred gate signal was not easy and stable, which was obviously unsuitable to long-term experiments. Thus, we used the passive filters to distinguish avalanche signals in this experiment.…”

“…The rapid gating techniques, e.g. the sinusoidal gating, [4][5][6] the self-differencing technique, [7][8][9] and precise transientsignal cancellation techniques 17,18) have the potential to overcome issues described above. The rapid gate techniques were originally developed in order to realize a sub-nanosecond gate width and the small avalanche signal discrimination which are beneficial to suppress noise counts efficiently.…”

“…[4][5][6] In this technique, the singlefrequency gate voltage is used so that we can easily distinguish small avalanche signals from the specific noise (transient pulse noise) due to the gate operation using passive filers, namely band-elimination filers (BEFs), or cancellation techniques. 17,18) Then, many advanced techniques based on the sinusoidal gating have been studied and demonstrated, [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] which contributes to improvement in the figure-of-merit of the InGaAs/InP-SPAD-based SPD. In this work, using simple drive circuit, the amplitude of sinusoidal voltage for the gate was increased so much, which realized a higher V , E a shorter gate width and lower circuit loss simultaneously.…”