Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are photon-counting detectors based on single-photon avalanche diodes which have the potential to detect single photons in the visible spectrum. In this paper, we present an embedded real-time communication system based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA platform with a 1mm-sq SiPM demonstrating the full potential of low power single-photon communication. The experimental results show that the implemented real-time system archives a Bit Error Rate (BER) 10-3 with less than 5pW of incident optical power at 100 kbps. The analysis of the implemented system performance in photon counting and BER enables the potential future adoption of low power FSO communication links in IoT, remote sensors, and energy harvesting devices.
KEYWORDS: Field programmable gate arrays, Time metrology, Tomography, Measurement devices, Logic, LIDAR, Imaging devices, Data transmission, Computer programming, Time of flight imaging
Time-to-digital converter (TDC) is a major component for the measurement of time intervals. Recent developments in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) have enabled the opportunity to implement high performance TDC which previously was only possible in dedicated hardware. We propose a TDC with cascaded carry chains, a customized encoder, a highly efficient histogram generator. It’s implemented on a 16nm FPGA while utilizing a Gigabit Ethernet for data transmission. Comparisons with previous works show the proposed TDC has lower resource utilization whilst achieving a better raw linearity which enables the path to high performance multichannel TDCs in demanding time-of-flight (ToF) imaging application.
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