A High-Resolution Single-Photon Arrival-Time Measurement With Self-Antithetic Variance Reduction in Quantum Applications: Theoretical Analysis and Performance Estimation

An almost all-digital time-to-digital converter (TDC) possessing subpicosecond resolutions, scalable dynamic ranges, high linearity, high noise immunity, and moderate conversion rates can be achieved by a random sampling-and-averaging (RSA) approach with the self-antithetic variance reduction (SAVR) technique for time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) quantum measurements. This article presents detailed theoretical analysis and behavior-model verifications of the SAVR technique to effectively enhance the conversion rate of an asynchronous RSA-based TDC by more than 62 times with 7% power overhead. In addition, the proposed performance estimation methodology for SAVR can greatly improve the computation efficiency during the system-level design and reduce the read-out circuit complexity in the silicon-photonics RSA-based TCSPC realization.