An integrated optical receiver with wide-range timing discrimination characteristics

An integrated receiver channel with a wide dynamic range for a pulsed time-of-flight laser rangefinder was designed and tested. The timing discriminator is realized so that the received unipolar pulse is converted to a bipolar signal at the front-end of the receiver channel, thus gain control and off-chip components are not needed. The walk error is 110 ps, or 16 mm in distance, over the dynamic range 1:1600. The minimum detectable signal is 1.52 μA with the required SNR of 10. The circuit was implemented in a 0.35-μm SiGe BiCMOS process.