A Wide-band Low-power ROIC for Optoelectronic mixer-based LiDAR System

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors enable precision sensing of an object in 3D. LiDAR technology is widely used in metrology, environment monitoring, archaeology, and robotics. It also shows high potential to be applied in autonomous driving. This paper proposes a Read-out Integrated Circuit (ROIC) for Optoelectronic mixer based LiDAR system design and fabricated in a standard 65nm CMOS technology. The proposed ROIC consisted of a wide bandwidth, high frequency Analog Front-End (AFE) and a long-range, low complexity Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) stage. The AFE is designed with a wide bandwidth from 10MHz to 11GHz with the input referred noise level of $5.6\mu A/\sqrt {Hz} .$. Besides, a long range, low complexity and low resolution TDC stage is implemented with the performance that can reach the maximum measurable distance of 92.1m with the distance resolution of 1.66cm. All components of the proposed ROIC are fully integrated on-chip, occupying an area of 0.85μm², with a measured power consumption of 31.76mW.