A CMOS front end for a laser rangefinder with resonance-based timing discrimination

An integrated receiver channel for a pulsed time-of-flight laser rangefinder has been designed and simulated. Timing errors are minimized by using a resonance-based timing discrimination at the input of the receiver channel. The front end of the receiver has been implemented using CMOS transistors. The noise of the front end has been analyzed, optimized, and compared to earlier receiver channel realizations. The simulations show that the receiver can use a minimum input pulse amplitude of 2.0 muA. The dynamic range is 1:2500 and the walk error is 165 ps.