A CMOS SPAD-based QVGA image sensor with 8µm pixel pitch and 26.8% fill factor is presented. The combination of analogue pixel electronics and scalable sharedwell SPAD devices facilitate high resolution, high fill-factor SPAD imaging arrays exhibiting photon shot noise limited statistics. The SPAD has 47CPS dark count rate at 1.5V excess bias (EB), 39.5% photon detection probability at 480nm and minimum 1.1ns dead time at 1V EB. Analogue single photon counting imaging is demonstrated with maximum 14.2mV/SPAD event sensitivity and 0.06e-minimum equivalent read noise. Binary Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) 16kFPS real-time oversampling is shown, verifying single photon QIS theory with 4.6x over-exposure latitude and 0.168e-read noise.

A 256 x 256 single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensor integrated in a 3D-stacked 90nm 1P4M/40nm 1P8M process is reported for flash light detection and ranging (LIDAR) or high speed direct time of flight (ToF) 3D imaging. The sensor bottom tier is composed of a 64x64 matrix of 36.72 m pitch modular photon processing units which operate from shared 4x4 SPADs at 9.18 m pitch and 51% fill-factor. A 16 x 14-bit counter array integrates photon counts or events to compress data to 31.4 Mbps at 30 fps readout over 8 I/O operating at 100 MHz. The pixel-parallel multi-event TDC approach employs a programmable internal or external clock for 0.56 ns to 560 ns time bin resolution. In conjunction with a perpixel correlator, the power is reduced to less than 100 mW in practical daylight ranging scenarios. Examples of ranging and high speed 3D TOF applications are given. Index Terms-3-D imaging, CMOS, direct time of flight (dTOF), histogramming, image sensor, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), time-to-digital converter (TDC), TDC sharing architecture, TOF.

Abstract:We demonstrate diffraction limited multiphoton imaging in a massively parallel, fully addressable time-resolved multi-beam multiphoton microscope capable of producing fluorescence lifetime images with sub50ps temporal resolution. This imaging platform offers a significant improvement in acquisition speed over single-beam laser scanning FLIM by a factor of 64 without compromising in either the temporal or spatial resolutions of the system. We demonstrate FLIM acquisition at 500 ms with live cells expressing green fluorescent protein. The applicability of the technique to imaging protein-protein interactions in live cells is exemplified by observation of time-dependent FRET between the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the adapter protein Grb2 following stimulation with the receptor ligand. Furthermore, ligand-dependent association of HER2-HER3 receptor tyrosine kinases was observed on a similar timescale and involved the internalisation and accumulation or receptor heterodimers within endosomes. These data demonstrate the broad applicability of this novel FLIM technique to the spatio-temporal dynamics of protein-protein interaction. 73-76 (1990). 9. F. Helmchen and W. Denk, "Deep tissue two-photon microscopy," Nat. Methods 2(12), 932-940 (2005). 10. J. Bewersdorf, R. Pick, and S. W. Hell, "Multifocal multiphoton microscopy," Opt. Lett. 23(9), 655-657 (1998) ©2015 Optical Society of America

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A 320x240 single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) based single photon counting image sensor is implemented in O.13flm imaging CMOS with state of the art 8flm pixel pitch at 26.8% fill factor. The imager is demonstrated operating as a global shutter (GS) oversampled binary image sensor reading out at 5.14kFPS. Frames are accumulated in real time on FPGA to construct a 256 photon/8bit output image at 20FPS.

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