IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2018 - 29

Vanode

Vout

Vanode

Voff

Vout

Voff

Vanode

VS

VAQ
TAQ
Figure 4: The simplified schematic of an active quenching circuit.

Soff
Vanode

Vout

Voff

Vout

Voff

Vanode

Soff

Vanode

Son

VS

Son

Son

TPRE

Soff

Figure 5: The simplified schematic of a high-Z quenching circuit.

Building Blocks for SPAD-Based ICs
Once the SPAD is connected to the
proper front end, it constitutes a
digital photon detector, providing digital pulses at its output for each avalanche. Of course, real photons, dark

counts, crosstalk, and afterpulsing
are, in principle, undistinguishable,
even though some of them show correlations and can be minimized with
post-processing.
The main characteristics of the
SPAD are the capability of detecting
single photons with a very high timing
resolution, and this is fully exploited
by a measurement technique called
time-correlated single-photon counting
(TCSPC) (Figure 8), where each photon
is time-tagged and counted in a histogram. By means of repetitive acquisitions, it is eventually possible to very

VS

VS

VS

precisely reconstruct the time evolution of fast optical events.
One of the fundamental building
blocks for a TCSPC measurement is a
stopwatch that, in circuital terms, is
referred to as a time-to-digital converter (TDC), or its analog counterpart,
the time-to-analog converter (TAC).
TDCs can be implemented in several ways. The simplest scheme samples with a register a traveling edge
through a delay line. However, this
implementation suffers from large
area requirements, and a commonly
adopted strategy is to fold the delay

VS
Vout

digital version exists, where the SPAD
outputs are digitally combined; this
is the solution of choice for CMOSbased SiPM [6].
Most of the SPADs operate in optimum conditions (i.e., minimum jitter
and maximum PDP) for relatively high
VEX, in the order of several volts. Often, therefore, the front-end circuits
are implemented with thick-oxide devices (i.e., 3.3 V or even higher), but
the subsequent circuits are conveniently designed with low-voltage metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect
transistor. Therefore, there is need for
level-shifting to safeguard the thin-oxide devices. As shown in Figure 7, conventional PMOS cross-coupled level
translators can be employed but also
more area-efficient solutions, such as
a simple clamping transistor with a
proper bias voltage.

RQ
-

Vout

Figure 6: The analog silicon photomultiplier with multiple passively quenched SPADs in
parallel and a fast transimpedance amplifier.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

su m m e r 2 0 18

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IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2018

Contents
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