A novel segmented SiPM combined with amplifiers on one chip with improved Single Photon Timing Resolution in 0.35 μm CMOS

We present a novel Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) device integrated with high-speed two-transistor amplifier circuits on a single chip using standard 0.35 μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. These amplifiers are configured as current followers to reduce the output capacitance and improve the amplitude and slew rate of the output signal. The efficiency of this solution is approximately proportional to the size of the SiPM. Measurement results show that the Single Photon Timing Resolution (SPTR) can be enhanced for the segmented SiPM with integrated amplifiers compared with a conventional analog CMOS SiPM that is designed with the same architecture but without an integrated amplifier. The proposed 1 x 1 mm ² SiPM, featuring integrated circuitry, achieves an SPTR of (117 ± 6) ps. In contrast, the conventional analog CMOS SiPM exhibits an SPTR of (221 ± 6) ps using the slow output and (155±6) ps using the fast output. In addition to timing resolution, we characterize the CMOS SiPM device in terms of dark count rate (DCR), correlated delayed noise (CDN), gain, crosstalk CT), and photon detection efficiency (PDE). The device exhibits a high gain of 1.16 x 10 ⁶ and low CT of 2.5%, but has a DCR of 2.8 Mhz/mm ² . The PDE, excluding crosstalk and CDN, is (10.9 ± 0.3)%.