A 20 A Sub-Nanosecond Integrated CMOS Laser Diode Driver for High Repetition Rate SPAD-Based Direct Time-of-Flight Measurements

This work presents the design of a high-power and intensive single chip integrated Laser Diode Driver (LDD) under fabrication in 160 nm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology for the direct time of flight (TOF) measurement in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) application. The LDD can produce a fully programmable sharp current pulses up to 20 A with less than 1 ns duration and a repetition rate of 40 MHz. Additionally, a current DAC is embedded to provide the threshold current required to bias laser diode above its threshold current to improve the response time of the laser diode.