Laser Radar Receiver Channel With Timing Detector Based on Front End Unipolar-to-Bipolar Pulse Shaping

An integrated receiver channel for a pulsed time-of-flight laser range finder is presented based on a timing discrimination principle in which the incoming unipolar detector current pulse is converted to a bipolar pulse at the front end of the receiver channel. Thus no optical or electrical gain control is needed within the dynamic range of the receiver, which according to measurements is 1:3000 with a timing walk error of plusmn 55 ps (plusmn 8 mm in distance). The minimum detectable input signal current is about 1.3 muA at an SNR of 10 with a bandwidth of 200 MHz. The circuit is realized in a 0.35 mum SiGe BiCMOS process and consumes 220 mW of power.

[1]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  A wide dynamic range receiver channel for a pulsed time-of-flight laser radar , 2001 .

[2]  Juha T. Kostamovaara,et al.  Time-To-Digital Converter For Fast, Accurate Laser Rangefinding , 1989, Other Conferences.

[3]  K.T. Kornegay,et al.  Jitter considerations in the design of a 10-Gb/s automatic gain control amplifier , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[4]  T. Ruotsalainen,et al.  A 250-MHz BiCMOS receiver channel with leading edge timing discriminator for a pulsed time-of-flight laser rangefinder , 2005, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[5]  R. J. Baker.  High voltage pulse generation using current mode second breakdown in a bipolar junction transistor , 1991 .

[6]  K. Määtta,et al.  Profiling of hot surfaces by pulsed time-of-flight laser range finder techniques. , 1993, Applied optics.

[7]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  Receiver channel with resonance-based timing detection for a laser range finder , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[8]  Peter Baltus,et al.  An 8-bit 100-MHz full-Nyquist analog-to-digital converter , 1988 .

[9]  S. Kurtti,et al.  An integrated optical receiver with wide-range timing discrimination characteristics , 2005, Proceedings of the 31st European Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2005. ESSCIRC 2005..

[10]  Charles L. Britton,et al.  An integrated, CMOS, constant-fraction timing discriminator for multichannel detector systems , 1994, Proceedings of 1994 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium - NSS'94.

[11]  W. Guggenbuhl,et al.  A high-swing, high-impedance MOS cascode circuit , 1990 .

[12]  Sung Min Park,et al.  1.25-Gb/s regulated cascode CMOS transimpedance amplifier for Gigabit Ethernet applications , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[13]  E. Sackinger,et al.  Broadband Circuits for Optical Fiber Communication , 2005 .

[14]  Rodger E. Ziemer,et al.  Principles of communications , 1976 .

[15]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  Tracking laser radar for 3-D shape measurements of large industrial objects based on time-of-flight laser rangefinding and position-sensitive detection techniques , 1994 .

[16]  Risto A. Myllylae,et al.  Laser range-finding techniques in the sensing of 3-D objects , 1990, Other Conferences.

[17]  K. Kobayashi,et al.  Traffic condition monitoring by laser radar for advanced safety driving , 1995, Proceedings of the Intelligent Vehicles '95. Symposium.

[18]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  Properties of the transient of avalanche transistor switching at extreme current densities , 2002 .

[19]  Helmuth Spieler,et al.  Semiconductor Detector Systems , 2005 .

[20]  Eduard Säckinger.  Broadband Circuits for Optical Fiber Communication: Säckinger/Broadband , 2005 .

[21]  Risto A. Myllylae,et al.  Pulsed time-of-flight laser range-finding techniques for industrial applications , 1992, Other Conferences.

[22]  J. Doernberg,et al.  A 10-bit 5-Msample/s CMOS two-step flash ADC , 1989 .