A novel quenching circuit to reduce afterpulsing of single photon avalanche diodes

摘要

In this paper, we report a new quenching circuit for single photon avalanche diodes, passive-quenching-with-active-reset. This circuit uses a large resistor to passively quench the avalanche current and a transistor to actively reset the diode to the operating voltage after a specified hold-off time. Afterpulsing is reduced by minimizing the total charge flow during avalanche, which can be achieved by minimizing the stray capacitance in the circuit. The simulation of the circuit using PSpice showed that the circuit is operating correctly. The operation of the circuit was demonstrated using discrete components. A quenching time of ~2ns and a dynamic range of～100dB have been achieved. The performance can be further improved by integrating the transistor with the photodiode to reduce the stray capacitance.