Prof. Edoardo Charbon's Talk on IR SPADs for LiDAR & Quantum Imaging

 

SWIR/NIR SPAD Image Sensors for LIDAR and Quantum Imaging Applications, by Prof. Charbon

In this talk, prof. Charbon will review the evolution of solid-state photon counting sensors from avalanche photodiodes (APDs) to silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) to single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs). The impact of these sensors on LiDAR has been remarkable, however, more innovations are to come with the continuous advance of integrated SPADs and the introduction of powerful computational imaging techniques directly coupled to SPADs/SiPMs. New technologies, such as 3D-stacking in combination with Ge and InP/InGaAs SPAD sensors, are accelerating the adoption of SWIR/NIR image sensors, while enabling new sensing functionalities. Prof. Charbon will conclude the talk with a technological perspective on how all these technologies could come together in low-cost, computational-intensive image sensors, for affordable, yet powerful quantum imaging

Edoardo Charbon (SM’00 F’17) received the Diploma from ETH Zurich, the M.S. from the University of California at San Diego, and the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, 1991, and 1995, respectively, all in electrical engineering and EECS. He has consulted with numerous organizations, including Bosch, X-Fab, Texas Instruments, Maxim, Sony, Agilent, and the Carlyle Group. He was with Cadence Design Systems from 1995 to 2000, where he was the Architect of the company's initiative on information hiding for intellectual property protection. In 2000, he joined Canesta Inc., as the Chief Architect, where he led the development of wireless 3-D CMOS image sensors.
Since 2002 he has been a member of the faculty of EPFL, where is a full professor. From 2008 to 2016 he was with Delft University of Technology’s as Chair of VLSI design. Dr. Charbon has been the driving force behind the creation of deep-submicron CMOS SPAD technology, which is mass-produced since 2015 and is present in telemeters, proximity sensors, and medical diagnostics tools. His interests span from 3-D vision, LiDAR, FLIM, FCS, NIROT to super-resolution microscopy, time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, and cryo-CMOS circuits and systems for quantum computing. He has authored or co-authored over 400 papers and two books, and he holds 24 patents. Dr. Charbon is the recipient of the 2023 IISS Pioneering Achievement Award, he is a distinguished visiting scholar of the W. M. Keck Institute for Space at Caltech, a fellow of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society, and a fellow of the IEEE.