A 4.5 ps TCSPC system for quantum sensing and imaging with superconducting nanowires

The constant advancements in single-photon technologies have led to the development of detectors with amazingly low jitter, that can play an important role in quantum measurements. A major limitation to their full exploitation in practical applications is represented by the timing electronics that should possess both low jitter characteristics, as well as good speed, linearity, and full-scale range (FSR) performance. In this paper, we propose a new TAC-based single-channel timing system that features a state-of-the-art timing jitter of 4.5 ps FWHM, along with a peak-to-peak DNL of 1.5% LSB and a speed of 12 Mcps, over a wide full-scale range of 12.5 ns. Thanks to the promising results achieved in experiments with SNSPDs, we are extending the system to eight channels, to leverage converter parallelization to further reduce timing jitter below 2 ps.