2,283 research outputs found
INTEGRATED SINGLE-PHOTON SENSING AND PROCESSING PLATFORM IN STANDARD CMOS
Practical implementation of large SPAD-based sensor arrays in the standard CMOS process has been fraught with challenges due to the many performance trade-offs existing at both the device and the system level [1]. At the device level the performance challenge stems from the suboptimal optical characteristics associated with the standard CMOS fabrication process. The challenge at the system level is the development of monolithic readout architecture capable of supporting the large volume of dynamic traffic, associated with multiple single-photon pixels, without limiting the dynamic range and throughput of the sensor.
Due to trade-offs in both functionality and performance, no general solution currently exists for an integrated single-photon sensor in standard CMOS single photon sensing and multi-photon resolution. The research described herein is directed towards the development of a versatile high performance integrated SPAD sensor in the standard CMOS process.
Towards this purpose a SPAD device with elongated junction geometry and a perimeter field gate that features a large detection area and a highly reduced dark noise has been presented and characterized. Additionally, a novel front-end system for optimizing the dynamic range and after-pulsing noise of the pixel has been developed. The pixel is also equipped with an output interface with an adjustable pulse width response. In order to further enhance the effective dynamic range of the pixel a theoretical model for accurate dead time related loss compensation has been developed and verified.
This thesis also introduces a new paradigm for electrical generation and encoding of the SPAD array response that supports fully digital operation at the pixel level while enabling dynamic discrete time amplitude encoding of the array response. Thus offering a first ever system solution to simultaneously exploit both the dynamic nature and the digital profile of the SPAD response. The array interface, comprising of multiple digital inputs capacitively coupled onto a shared quasi-floating sense node, in conjunction with the integrated digital decoding and readout electronics represents the first ever solid state single-photon sensor capable of both photon counting and photon number resolution. The viability of the readout architecture is demonstrated through simulations and preliminary proof of concept measurements
Digital pixel readout integrated circuit architectures for LWIR
This paper presents and discusses digital pixel readout integrated circuit architectures for long wavelength infrared (LWIR) in CMOS technology. Presented architectures are designed for scanning and staring arrays type detectors respectively. For scanning arrays, digital time delay integration (TDI) is implemented on 8 pixels with sampling rate up to 3 using CMOS 180nm technology. Input referred noise of ROIC is below 750 rms electron meanwhile power dissipation is appreciably under 30mW. ROIC design is optimized to perform at room as well as cryogenic temperatures. For staring type arrays, a digital pixel architecture relying on coarse quantization with pulse frequency modulation (PFM) and novel approach of extended integration is presented.. It can achieve extreme charge handling capacity of 2.04Ge(-) with 20 bit output resolution and power dissipation below 350 nW in CMOS 90nm technology. Efficient mechanism of measuring the time to estimate the remaining charge on integration capacitor in order to achieve low SNR has employed
Cosmic Origins (COR) Program Technology Development 2018
No abstract availabl
Strategies towards high performance (high-resolution/linearity) time-to-digital converters on field-programmable gate arrays
Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technology has become popular in scientific research and industrial applications, such as high-energy physics, bio-sensing, non-invasion health monitoring, and 3D imaging. Because of the increasing demand for high-precision time measurements, time-to-digital converters (TDCs) have attracted attention since the 1970s. As a fully digital solution, TDCs are portable and have great potential for multichannel applications compared to bulky and expensive time-to-amplitude converters (TACs). A TDC can be implemented in ASIC and FPGA devices. Due to the low cost, flexibility,
and short development cycle, FPGA-TDCs have become promising. Starting with a literature review, three original FPGA-TDCs with outstanding performance are introduced. The first design is the first efficient wave union (WU) based TDC implemented in Xilinx UltraScale (20 nm) FPGAs with a bubble-free sub-TDL structure. Combining with other existing methods, the resolution is further enhanced to 1.23 ps. The second TDC has been designed for LiDAR applications, especially in
driver-less vehicles. Using the proposed new calibration method, the resolution is adjustable (50, 80, and 100 ps), and the linearity is exceptionally high (INL pk-pk and INL pk-pk are lower than 0.05 LSB). Meanwhile, a software tool has been open-sourced with a graphic user interface (GUI) to predict TDCs’ performance. In the third TDC, an
onboard automatic calibration (AC) function has been realized by exploiting Xilinx ZYNQ SoC architectures. The test results show the robustness of the proposed method. Without the manual calibration, the AC function enables FPGA-TDCs to be applied in commercial products where mass production is required.Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technology has become popular in scientific research and industrial applications, such as high-energy physics, bio-sensing, non-invasion health monitoring, and 3D imaging. Because of the increasing demand for high-precision time measurements, time-to-digital converters (TDCs) have attracted attention since the 1970s. As a fully digital solution, TDCs are portable and have great potential for multichannel applications compared to bulky and expensive time-to-amplitude converters (TACs). A TDC can be implemented in ASIC and FPGA devices. Due to the low cost, flexibility,
and short development cycle, FPGA-TDCs have become promising. Starting with a literature review, three original FPGA-TDCs with outstanding performance are introduced. The first design is the first efficient wave union (WU) based TDC implemented in Xilinx UltraScale (20 nm) FPGAs with a bubble-free sub-TDL structure. Combining with other existing methods, the resolution is further enhanced to 1.23 ps. The second TDC has been designed for LiDAR applications, especially in
driver-less vehicles. Using the proposed new calibration method, the resolution is adjustable (50, 80, and 100 ps), and the linearity is exceptionally high (INL pk-pk and INL pk-pk are lower than 0.05 LSB). Meanwhile, a software tool has been open-sourced with a graphic user interface (GUI) to predict TDCs’ performance. In the third TDC, an
onboard automatic calibration (AC) function has been realized by exploiting Xilinx ZYNQ SoC architectures. The test results show the robustness of the proposed method. Without the manual calibration, the AC function enables FPGA-TDCs to be applied in commercial products where mass production is required
Energy efficiency of mmWave massive MIMO precoding with low-resolution DACs
With the congestion of the sub-6 GHz spectrum, the interest in massive
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating on millimeter wave
spectrum grows. In order to reduce the power consumption of such massive MIMO
systems, hybrid analog/digital transceivers and application of low-resolution
digital-to-analog/analog-to-digital converters have been recently proposed. In
this work, we investigate the energy efficiency of quantized hybrid
transmitters equipped with a fully/partially-connected phase-shifting network
composed of active/passive phase-shifters and compare it to that of quantized
digital precoders. We introduce a quantized single-user MIMO system model based
on an additive quantization noise approximation considering realistic power
consumption and loss models to evaluate the spectral and energy efficiencies of
the transmit precoding methods. Simulation results show that
partially-connected hybrid precoders can be more energy-efficient compared to
digital precoders, while fully-connected hybrid precoders exhibit poor energy
efficiency in general. Also, the topology of phase-shifting components offers
an energy-spectral efficiency trade-off: active phase-shifters provide higher
data rates, while passive phase-shifters maintain better energy efficiency.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin
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