A Low-Noise and Wide Dynamic Range 15 MHz CMOS Receiver for Pulsed Time-of-Flight Laser Ranging

A laser radar receiver channel targeted at pulsed time-of-flight laser radar applications using 5ns…20ns laser pulses at the 1550nm wavelength region has been designed. The receiver includes a transimpedance preamplifier, post-amplifiers and analog output buffer and has a bandwidth of 15MHz and input reduced total equivalent current noise of ~3nArms without the contribution of the APD noise. The receiver supports both the single shot and transient recording operation modes. By utilizing the time domain compensation methods, the single shot timing walk is at the level of +/−100ps within a wide dynamic range of 1: 36 000 of the received echo amplitudes. It is demonstrated that the designed receiver allows the pulsed time-of-flight measurement in the single shot mode to non-cooperative targets up to distances of several hundreds of meters with a laser pulse power of 4 W and receiver aperture of 20mm.