Modeling and Analysis of BER Performance in a SPAD-Based Integrated Fiber Optical Receiver

An analytical approach to model and analysis of the bit-error ratio (BER) performance in multi-single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) optical receivers is presented. The model covers all important non-ideality effects including the detector dead time, the optical signal profile, and the SPAD intrinsic parasitics. This is very helpful to understand the bottlenecks that limit the performance and, therefore, is critical to attempt further improvements. A good agreement to the experimental data is achieved and it is found that the crosstalk makes the major contribution to the BER as compared to the other parasitic effects including dark-counts and afterpulsing.