A Monolithically Integrated Time-of-Flight Sensor with Large Area Silicon Avalanche Photodiode

This paper presents a monolithically integrated CMOS receiver circuit for a pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) laser range-finder. The integrated CMOS Avalanche photodiode (APD) has an area of 300 × 300 μm
²
and demonstrates a breakdown voltage of ~10V. The receiver front-end consists of a Transimpedance Amplifier (TIA), a Post-Amplifier (PA) with an offset cancellation network and a 50Ω output buffer. The overall channel gain is 90dBΩ. The total area of the integrated circuit (IC) including bondpads and the APD is 1.48 mm
²
, and it consumes 132 mW power without the output buffer. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first reported fully integrated TOF CMOS receiver including the photodetector for an indoor pulsed based laser rangefinder.