Lidar Sampling ROIC

IEICE Electronics Express publishes Tianjin University, China, paper "A novel TDC/ADC hybrid reconstruction ROIC for LiDAR" by Xianzhao Xia, Mao Ye, Jiaji He, Kai Hu, and Yiqiang Zhao.

"A novel low complexity TDC/ADC hybrid reconstruction read-out circuit (ROIC) is proposed for LiDAR. Compared with other TDC-based receivers, the proposed circuit can provide a higher sampling speed, while consuming less power than ADC-based receivers. The circuit structure is constructed based on a sampler circuit to realize full waveform reconstruction. To further reduce power consumption, a Time Control Technique (TCT) is utilized to enable the sampler circuit to work only when needed. More specifically, the bandwidth, gain and input referred noise current spectral density of analog front-end (AFE) circuit are set as 150 M, 83 dB and 3.25 pA/sqrt (Hz), respectively. The experiment results demonstrate the feasibility that the sampler circuit can reach more than 3 GHz sampling frequency with only 2.8 mW power consumption."

While claimed "novel," the principle looks quite similar to ASC-Continental LiDAR and probably shares the same advantages and weaknesses: