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B. Goll, B. Steindl, H. Zimmermann:
"Cascoded Active Quencher for SPADs With Bipolar Differential Amplifier in 0.35 µm BiCMOS";
IEEE Photonics Journal, Vol. 14 (2022), No. 2; 8 S.

Fast active quenching of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) is important to reduce the afterpulsing probability (APP). An option to reduce the reaction time of electronics to a SPAD's avalanche is to design a quencher exploiting bipolar transistors. A quencher in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology with a nominal supply voltage of 3.3 V, which operated with excess bias voltages up to 6.6 V, was re-designed accordingly. In the new 0.35 μm pure-silicon BiCMOS quencher, the comparator takes advantage of a bipolar differential amplifier, which additionally gives the head room to increase the width of some CMOS transistors as well. The proposed BiCMOS quencher is able to drive the load of a wire-bonded 184 μm-diameter SPAD, while the CMOS design fails. A comparison, where both chips are measured with a wire-bonded, 34 μm-diameter SPAD, shows that the BiCMOS quencher has a reaction time, which is 330 ps to 1.1 ns faster than that of the CMOS quencher.

SPAD, active quenching, BiCMOS, CMOS.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JPHOT.2022.3149719