Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) are emerging single photon detectors used in many applications requiring large active area, photon-number resolving capability and immunity to magnetic fields. We present three families of analog SiPM fabricated in a reliable and cost-effective fully standard planar CMOS technology with a total photosensitive area of 1×1 mm². These three families have different active areas with fill-factors (21%, 58.3%, 73.7%) comparable to those of commercial SiPM, which are developed in vertical (current flow) custom technologies. The peak photon detection efficiency in the near-UV tops at 38% (fill-factor included) comparable to commercial custom-process ones and dark count rate density is just a little higher than the best-in-class commercial analog SiPMs. Thanks to the CMOS processing, these new SiPMs can be integrated together with active components and electronics both within the microcell and on-chip, in order to act at the microcell level or to perform global pre-processing. We also report CMOS digital SiPMs in the same standard CMOS technology, based on microcells with digitalized processing, all integrated on-chip. This CMOS digital SiPMs has four 32×1 cells (128 microcells), each consisting of SPAD, active quenching circuit with adjustable dead time, digital control (to switch off noisy SPADs and readout position of detected photons), and fast trigger output signal. The achieved 20% fill-factor is still very good.

Date Published: 17 April 2015
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9359, Optical Components and Materials XII, 93591B (17 April 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2077473

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9359:
Optical Components and Materials XII
Shibin Jiang; Michel J. F. Digonnet, Editor(s)