SiPM in 55nm Globalfoundries BCD Process

EPFL, Globalfoundries, and KIST publish an Arxiv.org paper "On Analog Silicon Photomultipliers in Standard 55-nm BCD Technology for LiDAR Applications" by Jiuxuan Zhao, Tommaso Milanese, Francesco Gramuglia, Pouyan Keshavarzian, Shyue Seng Tan, Michelle Tng, Louis Lim, Vinit Dhulla, Elgin Quek, Myung-Jae Lee, and Edoardo Charbon.

"We present an analog silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) based on a standard 55 nm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology. The SiPM is composed of 16×16 single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) and measures 0.29×0.32 mm2. Each SPAD cell is passively quenched by a monolithically integrated 3.3 V thick oxide transistor. The measured gain is 3.4× 10^5 at 5 V excess bias voltage. The single-photon timing resolution (SPTR) is 185 ps and the multiple-photon timing resolution (MPTR) is 120 ps at 3.3 V excess bias voltage. We integrate the SiPM into a co-axial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system with a time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) module in FPGA. The depth measurement up to 25 m achieves an accuracy of 2 cm and precision of 2 mm under the room ambient light condition. With co-axial scanning, the intensity and depth images of complex scenes with resolutions of 128×256 and 256×512 are demonstrated. The presented SiPM enables the development of cost-effective LiDAR system-on-chip (SoC) in the advanced technology."