Paper

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My Fourth Paper

This work was invited to extend the work from my first paper, a conference item, to a IEEE Photonics Technology Letter. This work

Abstract

A relationship between irradiance and the current needed to maintain the bias voltage applied to a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is shown to agree with experimental data. In addition to showing the saturation of the SiPMs response this relationship can be used to determine the power consumed by an SiPM. In addition, results are presented which show that, because of its higher maximum photon count rate, a 30020 SiPM can achieve a bit error rate (BER) of 10$^{-3}$ at a data rate of 3.45 Gbits/s.

Key Findings

Results from data transmission experiments show the J30020 SiPM from Onsemi offers a higher performance than the J30035 owing to its higher output pulse rate. The paper speculates about what may be required for future receivers to operate at higher data rates.

The bias current a SiPM sinks as a consequence of the ambient light falling upon it can be expressed as:

$$ I_{\text{bias}} = \frac{Q_{\text{cell}} N_{\text{cells}}\alpha(L+L_{\text{dark}})}{1 + \alpha \tau_{\text{recharge}} (L+L_{\text{dark}})} $$

In this expression, $Q_{\text{cell}}, N_{\text{cells}}, \tau_{\text{recharge}}$ and $L_{\text{dark}}$ are the charge needed to recharge a microcell, the number of microcells, the recharge time and the irradiance that is equivalent to the dark count rate of the SiPM.

And $\alpha$ is defined as: $$\alpha = \frac{\eta A_{\text{SiPM}}}{E_p}$$ Where $A_{\text{SiPM}}$, $\eta$, and $E_p$ are defined as the area of the SiPM, the photon detection efficiency and the photon energy.