Silicon Photomultipliers With Area Up to 9 mm² in a 0.35-$\mu$ m CMOS Process

Abstract

Silicon photomultipliers produced using standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes are at the basis of modern applications of sensors for weak photon fluxes. They allow in fact to integrate transistor-based electronic components within sensors and provide intelligent read-out strategies. In this paper, we investigate the scalability of a 0.35-μm CMOS process to large area devices. We report the design and characterization of SiPMs with a total area of 1, 4, and 9 mm 2 . Cross talk, photon detection efficiency at 420 nm, gain at 2.5 V overvoltage and breakdown voltage temperature coefficient do not depend on the total area of the sensor and are 10%, 35%, 2.5 × 10 6 , and 35 mV/K, respectively. The dark count rate scales with the total area of the device as 180 kHz/mm 2 . The total output capacitance, the decay time of the single photon signal, and the single photon time resolution depend on the area of the device. We obtain a capacitance of 66.9, 270.2, and 554.0 pF, a decay time of (27.1±0.1) ns, (50.8±0.1) ns, and (78.2±0.1) ns and a single photon time resolution of (77.97±0.51) ps, (201.67 ± 0.98) ps, and (282.28 ± 0.86) ps for the 1, 4, and 9 mm 2 SiPMs, respectively.INDEX TERMS Silicon photomultiplier (SiPM), avalanche breakdown structures, CMOS, sensors for brain positron emission tomography.

The JOINBON SiPM for the readout of LySO crystals: a Multi Voltage Threshold approach

“…During the past few years we have reported the realization of related high bandwidth digital read-out electronics for radiation sensors [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. As a possible solution to the sampling-rate challenge, we have previously proposed a multi-voltage threshold (MVT) sampling method that takes samples of a pulse with respect to a set of reference voltages.…”