Position Sensitive Silicon Photomultiplier With Intrinsic Continuous Cap Resistive Layer

A high-gain, position-sensitive photon number discriminating detector based on silicon photomultiplier (PS-SiPM) is proposed and fabricated. The device, compatible with standard CMOS fabrication process, is easy to implement owing to the intrinsic continuous and uniform cap resistive layer featured by an SiPM structure with bulk quenching resistor. Both the 2-D position information and the photon number of incident pulse light can be obtained from a tetralateral type configuration using a simple algebra calculation of its four readout signals. If one of the four anode electrodes on front side or the cathode electrode on rear side is used for signal output, the PS-SiPM can function as a regular SiPM with high resolved photon number discrimination. The device, with an active area of 2.2 mm × 2.2 mm, demonstrated spatial resolution of 78-97 μm, gain of 1.4 × 10⁵ and 46-ps time jitter of transmission delay for multiple photons.