Monolithic active quenching and picosecond timing circuit suitable for large-area single-photon avalanche diodes

Gallivanoni, Andrea; Rech, Ivan; Resnati, D.; Ghioni, M.; Cova, S.

doi:10.1364/oe.14.005021

Cited by 35 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…To this end, we completely revised the design of an integrated AQC (iAQC) previously developed by our group, 17,18 in order to reduce dead time to the least possible value. Nowadays, many AQC have been presented in the literature with even shorter dead times.…”

Section: Fast Active Quenching Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our AQC is designed to work in conjunction with custom technology SPAD 16 which features better performance although being realized on a different chip. The increased performance of the proposed quenching circuit, with respect to those of the previous versions, 17 is mainly due to a better fabrication technology (0.18 µm CMOS instead of 0.8 µm CMOS) along with a careful optimization of the delays. In previous versions, the main goal was to keep the number of transistors as low as possible and so there was a trade-off between area occupation and performance.…”

Section: Fast Active Quenching Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 3 shows the simplified block diagram of the optimized iAQC, derived from the structure reported in Ref. 17.…”

Section: Fast Active Quenching Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving the counting efficiency in time-correlated single photon counting experiments by dead-time optimization

Peronio

Acconcia

Rech

et al. 2015

Review of Scientific Instruments

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Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) has been long recognized as the most sensitive method for fluorescence lifetime measurements, but often requiring "long" data acquisition times. This drawback is related to the limited counting capability of the TCSPC technique, due to pile-up and counting loss effects. In recent years, multi-module TCSPC systems have been introduced to overcome this issue. Splitting the light into several detectors connected to independent TCSPC modules proportionally increases the counting capability. Of course, multi-module operation also increases the system cost and can cause space and power supply problems. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on a new detector and processing electronics designed to reduce the overall system dead time, thus enabling efficient photon collection at high excitation rate. We present a fast active quenching circuit for single-photon avalanche diodes which features a minimum dead time of 12.4 ns. We also introduce a new Time-to-Amplitude Converter (TAC) able to attain extra-short dead time thanks to the combination of a scalable array of monolithically integrated TACs and a sequential router. The fast TAC (F-TAC) makes it possible to operate the system towards the upper limit of detector count rate capability (∼80 Mcps) with reduced pile-up losses, addressing one of the historic criticisms of TCSPC. Preliminary measurements on the F-TAC are presented and discussed. C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx

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Section: Fast Active Quenching Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fast Active Quenching Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving the counting efficiency in time-correlated single photon counting experiments by dead-time optimization

Peronio

Acconcia

Rech

et al. 2015

Review of Scientific Instruments

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“…To solve this problem with no loss in sensitivity requires the use of active quenching techniques which, on the other hand, have to fight against parasitic signals that contaminate the photosignal of interest. [17][18][19] In a passive quenching scheme for low optical repetition frequencies, shortening of photopulses is advantageous. Because the informative content of the photosignal is in the amplitude, the long tail in the pulse is unnecessary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies for shortening the output pulse of silicon photomultipliers

Yebras

2012

Opt. Eng

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Abstract. In this work, three strategies for shortening the output pulse of a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) are reported. The first strategy is passive filtering, where band-pass filtering removes the lowest frequency components in the signal, getting a noticeable reduction in pulse width (a compression ratio of 10∶1 was obtained). In the second place, a reflectometric scheme is proposed where the amplified signal coming from the SiPM is injected into a signal splitter with one of its stubs connected to a short-circuited stub. In the last strategy, the reflectometric part is replaced by an analog subtractor circuit. In this approach, a signal splitter with stubs of different lengths is used. All solutions provide good compression ratios, up to 10∶1. Best pulses obtained are single narrow peaks, with width below 10 ns, preserving the photonic modulation and with good pseudoGaussian shape, single polarity and low ringing. The potential of pulse shortening for improving the capability of the detector to resolve single photons is demonstrated by mean of single photon counting patterns. The detection error probability is reduced in one order of magnitude when shortening is used for conditioning the output photosignal. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

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“…The bias voltage is then restored in order to detect another photon. This operation requires a suitable circuit that is usually referred to as quenching circuit [10,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%