A Fully-integrated GaN Driver for Time-of-flight Lidar Applications

Referring to direct time-of-flight Lidar for distance measurement, shorter pulse width (PW) gives better resolution while higher pulse amplitude increases detection range. In this work, a fully-integrated laser GaN driver by utilizing self-circulating slew-rate enhancement 3X charge pump is proposed to minimize the pulse width without degrading time delay. Experimental results show that this driver achieves current pulse with 10A peak value and 2ns PW at f sw =20MHz, where the turn-on delay/turn-off delay are 1.98ns/953ps and rise/fall time of V DS are 435ps/259ps. Due to an optimized high-speed PCB design, large voltage ringing is not seen during test and good thermal performance is obtained as well.