Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2019

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Electrical Engineering

Major Professor

Nicole McFarlane

Committee Members

Benjamin J. Blalock, Garrett Rose, Steven A. Ripp

Abstract

Photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) are used as photo-sensors in many applications including the medical field, nuclear science, and astrophysics. Since silicon photmultipliers (SiPMs) are relatively insusceptible to magnetic fields, compact, and require relatively lower bias voltages, they have been aroused interests and showing a great potential as a substitute to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). SiPM consists of a large array of parallel diodes biased above breakdown with a series resistor. These diodes are known as single photon avalanche diodes or SPADs. This dissertation designs and characterizes SiPMs based on a new device Perimeter Gated SPADs or PGSPAD, fabricated in standard CMOS process. The novel contributions of this work are as follows. 1. The effectiveness of the additional gate terminal to modulate the breakdown voltage has been verified for the perimeter gated SPAD device fabricated in standard 0.5 μm HV and 0.35 μm CMOS processes. 2. PGSPAD noise has been experimentally characterized over a range of temperatures with the variation of gate voltage for the first time. 3. A full chip CMOS analog SiPM using PGSPAD has been reported for the first time and fully characterized for noise, sensitivity, signal to noise ratio throughout the visible spectral range, and thermal characterization for varying bias voltages. 4. A CMOS digital SiPM with fully digital asynchronous address event representation (AER) readout has been demonstrated for the first time to provide high bandwidth with tunable noise performance using PGSPAD based pixels. 5. Finally, a novel electrical model for the perimeter gated SPAD based silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) detector has been developed to accurately simulate the static, dynamic, and stochastic noise behavior of the SiPM detector with the effect of additional gate terminal.

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