High-speed fully-integrated electronics for high-performance measurements with single photon avalanche diode arrays

Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) provide remarkable features including single-photon sensitivity and picosecond timing capability. For these reasons, they are the detectors of choice in a large variety of applicationsincluding Light Detection and Ranging, Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging, quantum cryptography and many others. In most cases, the electronics used to drive the SPAD plays a crucial role in determining the performance of the overall system. In particular, high speed is still an open challenge for SPAD-based systems. In this paper, we discuss fully integrated electronics and system architectures to maximize the speed of these systems while providing overall high performance both for counting and timing applications.