0.5 billion events per second time correlated single photon counting using CMOS SPAD arrays

Nikola Krstajić*, Simon Poland, James Levitt, Richard Walker, Ahmet Erdogan, Simon Ameer-Beg, Robert K. Henderson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalLetterpeer-review

68 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We present a digital architecture for fast acquisition of time correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) events from a 32 × 32 complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) single photon avalanche detector (SPAD) array (Megaframe) to the computer memory. Custom firmware was written to transmit event codes from 1024-TCSPCenabled pixels for fast transfer of TCSPC events. Our 1024-channel TCSPC system is capable of acquiring up to 0.5 × 109 TCSPC events per second with 16 histogram bins spanning a 14 ns width. Other options include 320 × 106 TCSPC events per second with 256 histogram bins spanning either a 14 or 56 ns time window. We present a wide-field fluorescence microscopy setup demonstrating fast fluorescence lifetime data acquisition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest direct TCSPC transfer from a single photon counting device to the computer to date.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4305-4308
Number of pages4
JournalOptics Letters
Volume40
Issue number18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Sept 2015

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