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  4. A CMOS SPAD Imager with Collision Detection and 128 Dynamically Reallocating TDCs for Single-Photon Counting and 3D Time-of-Flight Imaging
 
research article

A CMOS SPAD Imager with Collision Detection and 128 Dynamically Reallocating TDCs for Single-Photon Counting and 3D Time-of-Flight Imaging

Zhang, Chao
•
Lindner, Scott  
•
Antolovic, Ivan Michel  
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November 1, 2018
Sensors

Per-pixel time-to-digital converter (TDC) architectures have been exploited by single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensors to achieve high photon throughput, but at the expense of fill factor, pixel pitch and readout efficiency. In contrast, TDC sharing architecture usually features high fill factor at small pixel pitch and energy efficient event-driven readout. While the photon throughput is not necessarily lower than that of per-pixel TDC architectures, since the throughput is not only decided by the TDC number but also the readout bandwidth. In this paper, a SPAD sensor with 32 x 32 pixels fabricated with a 180 nm CMOS image sensor technology is presented, where dynamically reallocating TDCs were implemented to achieve the same photon throughput as that of per-pixel TDCs. Each 4 TDCs are shared by 32 pixels via a collision detection bus, which enables a fill factor of 28% with a pixel pitch of 28.5 mu m. The TDCs were characterized, obtaining the peak-to-peak differential and integral non-linearity of -0.07/+0.08 LSB and -0.38/+0.75 LSB, respectively. The sensor was demonstrated in a scanning light-detection-and-ranging (LiDAR) system equipped with an ultra-low power laser, achieving depth imaging up to 10 m at 6 frames/s with a resolution of 64 x 64 with 50 lux background light.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.3390/s18114016
Web of Science ID

WOS:000451598900426

Author(s)
Zhang, Chao
Lindner, Scott  
Antolovic, Ivan Michel  
Wolf, Martin
Charbon, Edoardo  
Date Issued

2018-11-01

Published in
Sensors
Volume

18

Issue

11

Article Number

4016

Subjects

Chemistry, Analytical

•

Electrochemistry

•

Instruments & Instrumentation

•

Chemistry

•

single-photon avalanche diode

•

spad

•

time-of-flight

•

dynamic reallocation

•

time-to-digital converter

•

collision detection bus

•

image sensor

•

light detection and ranging

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lidar

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sensor

•

array

Note

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

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December 14, 2018
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/152966
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