Fully integrated electronics for high-performance and high-speed acquisition with Single Photon Avalanche Diodes

Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) offer clear advantages in single-photon measurements, but their operation at high rates is still an open challenge. Targeting the exploitation of our custom-technology SPADs, we designed a fully integrated Active Quenching Circuit (AQC) able to achieve a rate as high as 160Mcps. In timing, we designed an AQC with a tunable dead time to avoid pile-up distortion and a fully differential pick-up circuit providing picoseconds timing jitter even at high count rates. Exploiting a Si-Ge 0.35µm technology we also developed a Time-to-Amplitude Converter able to provide a state-of-art timing precision of less than 4.3ps rms.