Abstract:
We present a novel silicon photomultiplier (SiPM)
device integrated with high-speed two-transistor amplifier circuits
on a single chip using standard 0.35-μm complementary
metal—oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. These amplifiers
are configured as current followers to reduce the output
capacitance and improve the amplitude and slew rate of the
output signal. The efficiency of this solution is approximately
proportional to the size of the SiPM. Measurement results show
that the single-photon timing resolution (SPTR) can be enhanced
for the segmented SiPM with integrated amplifiers compared
with a conventional analog CMOS SiPM that is designed with
the same architecture but without an integrated amplifier. The
proposed 1 × 1 mm2 SiPM, featuring integrated circuitry,
achieves an SPTR of 117 ±6 ps. In contrast, the conventional
analog CMOS SiPM exhibits an SPTR of 221 ±6 ps using the
slow output and 155 ±6 ps using the fast output. In addition
to timing resolution, we characterize the CMOS SiPM device in
terms of dark count rate (DCR), correlated delayed noise (CDN),
gain, crosstalk (CT), and PDE. The device exhibits a high gain of
1.16 × 106 and low CT of 2.5%, but has a DCR of 2.8 Mhz/mm2.
The PDE, excluding CT and CDN, is 10.9% ± 0.3%.