A fast driver circuit for single-photon sensors

A fast active quenching and recharging circuit (AQRC) for single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) is presented in this paper. The proposed driver exhibits a lower than 10 ns overall quenching time allowing a tunable excess voltage from 5 to 12 V. The circuit was designed by using the dielectrically insulated BiCMOS technology supplied by ST Microelectronics. Many post-layout ELDO simulations have validated the high performance of the proposed topology, which is actually the fastest AQRC reported in the literature.