High-performance integrated circuits for fast and picosecond-precision measurements with single-photon avalanche diodes

The Time Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) technique is a powerful tool to analyze extremely fast and faint optical signals; however, its main drawback relies in its intrinsic slowness which is due to the necessity to acquire a large number of events to make an accurate reconstruction of the analog waveform in the time domain. In recent years, a significant research effort has been put in the design of multichannel systems: indeed, parallelization could in principle increase the overall speed of the acquisition system. In this scenario, we focused on the investigation of both singlechannel and multichannel systems potentiality to push the speed of TCSPC acquisition towards its ultimate limits. In this paper we report a solution to increase the speed of a single-channel system by almost an order of magnitude with respect to the state of the art and a smart routing architecture to provide a true increment of the acquisition speed based on the exploitation of a single photon detector array