Analog Front-End Circuits With Input Current Attenuation and Heterodyne Techniques for Low-Cost Phase-Shift LADAR Receiver

Analog front-end (AFE) circuits with wide dynamic range and low walk error for cost-effective phase-shift LADAR receiver are presented in this work. The inverter-based trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) utilized in the proposed AFE has been modified with two additional transistors in its input node, which can attenuate the input current automatically and adjust the bandwidth dynamically. The improved TIA significantly increases the dynamic range of AFE without any complicated gain-control circuits, while keeping the walk error in a low level. Heterodyne techniques are then adopted to modulate the received signals to low-frequency carriers, as well as the driving signal of laser diode, which is modulated with a mirrored voltage-input channel. Thus, systematic errors caused by the uncertainty of the initial phase in transmitted signal can be reduced. As a result, high-accuracy phase detections and range measurements can be realized conveniently by just sampling two low-frequency (~100 kHz in this design) output signals. The AFE circuits have been fabricated in a standard 65-nm CMOS technology with a total chip area of 0.59\times0.68 mm² including the IO PADs. The measured power consumption is 24.3 mW with a 2.5-V supply. With a modulated frequency of 30 MHz and a local oscillator frequency of 30.1 MHz, the measured input-referred noise of the proposed AFE is 8.4 nA_RMS and the walk error is less than ±1.8% for a wide dynamic range of 500 nA ~ 10 mA. The measurement results show that the proposed AFE can achieve wide dynamic range and low walk error, while the system complexity and cost of the phase-shift LADAR receiver can also be reduced.