Perimeter-Gated Single-Photon Avalanche Diode Imager with Vanishing Room Temperature Dark Count Probability

M. S. Sajal, K. -C. Lin, B. Senevirathna, S. Lu and M. Dandin, "Perimeter-Gated Single-Photon Avalanche Diode Imager with Vanishing Room Temperature Dark Count Probability," 2022 29th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS), Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2022, pp. 1-4 [Online Article]

We report on a perimeter-gated single-photon avalanche diode (pg-SPAD) imager fabricated in a 0.35 μm CMOS process. The imager had 4,096 pixels disposed in a two-dimensional array ( 64×64 ) and peripheral circuitry for pixel access and readout. We demonstrate that the room temperature probability of a dark count occurring at a single pixel vanishes when perimeter gating is used. We further demonstrate that the array-wide noise variance decreases with an increase in perimeter gate voltage magnitude. The proposed imager architecture lays the foundation for single-photon imaging with negligible dark signal non-uniformity (DSNU).