Behavioral Modeling of Photon Arrival Time for Time-of-Flight Measurement Circuit Simulation

This letter proposes a behavioral model to estimate the statistical photon arrival time for time-of-flight (TOF) measurement circuit simulation. A theoretical model is derived to calculate the photon arrival rate by full consideration of a variety of properties of a TOF measurement system, such as laser source, optics, single-photon avalanche diode detector, target distance, and ambient illumination. For the first time, the newly developed model is implemented in behavioral Verilog-A hardware description language and successfully operated on Cadence Spectre simulator for TOF circuit simulation. It is capable of accurately predicting the statistical performance parameters such as photon arrival time and achievable distance, providing a new candidate tool for the ease of design and simulation of various high-performance TOF measurement circuits.