Panasonic Flash LiDAR Paper

MDPI Special Issue on The International SPAD Sensor Workshop publishes Panasonic paper "A 250 m Direct Time-of-Flight Ranging System Based on a Synthesis of Sub-Ranging Images and a Vertical Avalanche Photo-Diodes (VAPD) CMOS Image Sensor" by Yutaka Hirose, Shinzo Koyama, Motonori Ishii, Shigeru Saitou, Masato Takemoto, Yugo Nose, Akito Inoue, Yusuke Sakata, Yuki Sugiura, Tatsuya Kabe, Manabu Usuda, Shigetaka Kasuga, Mitsuyoshi Mori, Akihiro Odagawa, and Tsuyoshi Tanaka.

"We have developed a direct time-of-flight (TOF) 250 m ranging Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor (CIS) based on a 688 × 384 pixels array of vertical avalanche photodiodes (VAPD). Each pixel of the CIS comprises VAPD with a standard four transistor pixel circuit equipped with an analogue capacitor to accumulate or count avalanche pulses. High power near infrared (NIR) short (less than 50 ns) and repetitive (6 kHz) laser pulses are illuminated through a diffusing optics. By globally gating the VAPD, each pulse is counted in the in-pixel counter enabling extraction of sub-photon level signal. Depth map imaging with a 10 cm lateral resolution is realized from 1 m to 250 m range by synthesizing subranges images of photon counts. Advantages and limitation of an in-pixel circuit are described. The developed CIS is expected to supersede insufficient resolution of the conventional light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems and the short range of indirect CIS TOF."