A fully-integrated 780×800μm2 multi-digital silicon photomultiplier with column-parallel time-to-digital converter

This paper presents a digital silicon photomultiplier based on column-parallel time-to-digital converter (TDC), so as to improve the time resolution of single-photon detection. By reducing the number of pixels per TDC, the pixel-to-pixel skew is reduced. We achieved 264 ps FWHM time resolution of single-photon detection using a 48-fold column-parallel TDC with a temporal resolution of 51.8ps (LSB), fully integrated in standard CMOS technology. The potential for multi-photon detection is discussed in the paper with a 48-column-parallel TDC configuration.