A fast active quenching and recharging circuit for single-photon avalanche diodes

This paper presents a fast active quenching and recharging circuit (AQRC) for single-photon avalanches diodes (SPAD). The proposed circuit topology exhibits an overall quenching time lower than 1.5ns and quiescent power dissipation equal to about 5mW. Moreover, the circuit allows tunable excess voltage from 5V to 12V. The circuit was design by using the DIB12 BiCMOS 2 μm technology supply by STM that is perfectly compatible with the SPAD process. Many SPECTRE simulations were executed in different operative conditions confirming the high performance of the proposed topology.