MiSPiA: microelectronic single-photon 3D imaging arrays for low-light high-speed safety and security applications

This paper reports the achievements so far attained in the development of high-performance CMOS SPADs for single-photon sensitive 2D imagers, based on photon-counting and 3D ranging cameras. The latters are based on both the direct in-pixel measurement of the Time-of-Flight of each photon bouncing bounce from the scene back to the camera and the “indirect” phase-resolved method to count reflected photons in well-defined time slots, synchronous to the active illumination of the scene. MiSPiA SPADs are the new state-of-the-art among SPADs in CMOS technologies