Development Of Shallow Trench Isolation Bounded Single Photon Avalanche Detectors For Acousto Optic Signal Enhancement And Frequency Up Conversion
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Development of Shallow Trench Isolation Bounded Single-photon Avalanche Detectors for Acousto-optic Signal Enhancement and Frequency Up-conversion
This dissertation describes the development of the first CMOS single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) fabricated in a deep-submicron commercial CMOS process. Single photon detection is often necessary for high-sensitivity, high dynamic range time-resolved optical measurements in diverse applications in medicine, biology, military, and optical communication links. Single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors have become the device of choice and have made strong gains in recent years. They are unique in that they provide digital information of the arrival of an individual photon impinging on the detector, thus being a very powerful tool when time-of-arrival information and timing resolution are crucial. Timing precision of the detector will improve contrast in fluorescence lifetime imaging and resolution in laser ranging applications. Traditionally, single photon detectors have been fabricated using custom processes because of the conditions under which the devices operate under. Because of the need to sustain high currents and high electric-fields, special custom fabrication processes have been developed. These fabrication processes have great benefits such as low-noise, high detection efficiencies, low jitter, and tailored spectral responses towards longer wavelengths. However, these fabrication techniques are often undesirable due to increased capacitance from off-chip quenching, recharging, and processing circuitry, resulting in longer detector dead times and slower sampling rates. Furthermore, large-scale production and scalability to arrays is impractical. There has been a trend towards using Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology for constructing SPAD pixels and arrays with integrated circuitry to overcome these limitations. Though commercial CMOS technologies are by nature, generic, and are not designed for SPAD devices, they can still offer considerable advantages in certain areas where custom processes lack. This dissertation describes the modeling, simulation, and full characterization of a CMOS STI-bounded Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD). State-of-the-art sampling rates, dead-time, and jitter performance are characterized, and the device is compared to traditional diffused-guard ring structures for solid-state SPADs. Further, novel applications of the CMOS SPAD for acousto-optic signal enhancement and frequency up-conversion of 1550nm are described. An optical scatter system for acoustic characterization of ultrasound responsive microbubbles and particles is designed and developed. Further, a novel method of fluorescence modulation using dye-loaded microbubbles is demonstrated.
High-Speed Single-Photon Detection with Avalanche Photodiodes in the Near Infrared
As the requisite optical components in quantum information processing, single-photon detectors of high performance at the near-infrared wavelengths are in urgent need. In this paper, we review our recent development in high-speed single-photon detection with avalanche photodiodes, increasing the working repetition frequency up to GHz. Ingenious techniques, such as capacitance-balancing, self-differencing, low-pass filtering, and frequency up-conversion, were employed to achieve high-speed single-photon detection with high detection efficiency and low error counts, offering facility for many important applications, such as laser ranging and imaging, quantum key distribution at GHz clock rate.
III-V Single Photon Avalanche Detector with Built-in Negative Feedback for NIR Photon Detection
Single photon detector is the key component in many applications. Extensive research has been focused on developing novel Single Photon Avalanche Detectors (SPADs) to improve the device performance. This dissertation presents the first III-V single photon avalanche detector with built-in negative feedback mechanism. This new type of device has several advantageous features compared to the conventional III-V SPADs. The development of such devices has evolved from the InGaAs MOS-SPADs to the InGaAs Transient Carrier Buffer (TCB) SPADs. In general, to detect single photons, a conventional Geiger mode APD is biased above its breakdown voltage and an external quenching circuit or gated mode operation is required to prevent the device from thermal run-away. Benefiting from the negative feedback, the prototype device of the InGaAs TCB SPADs has successfully demonstrated the true free-running single photon detection at 1.55um wavelength without using any external quenching circuit or gated mode operation. This could greatly simplify the complexity of the SPAD supporting circuit and be especially beneficial for the applications for which large scale single photon array detector is required. The prototype device also has demonstrated a record low excess noise factor of 1.001 at a gain of 106. With such low excess noise, this type of devices becomes also promising for photon number resolving applications. This dissertation also provides a physical model to describe the self-quenching and self-recovering process of the InGaAs TCB SPADs. The model couples the negative feedback mechanism with the impact ionization process and has the capability to simulate the key device characteristics even when the device is biased above its breakdown condition, where most commercial device simulators have failed to simulate. Lastly, this dissertation describes a frequency up-conversion scheme based on the hot-carrier radiative recombination in the multiplication region of InGaAs TCB SPADs. Preliminary experimental results suggest this new method could be potentially used for near infrared single photon imagers with high resolution.