Integrated Streak Camera with on Chip Analog Averaging for Low Light Level Imaging

We propose a technique to suppress the noise of Trans-Impedance Amplifiers (TIAs) in an integrated streak camera for repeatable input signals. This approach requires only a minor modification to the sensor architecture, involving the addition of a single power supply connected to the column buffer of the sampling cell. The noise rejection mechanism operates independently of the system's effective bandwidth. Simulation results demonstrate a reduction in TIA noise from 5.2 mV to 0.31 mV, which corresponds to the fundamental limit imposed by thermal noise on the sampling capacitor (kTC noise). As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio improves by more than an order of magnitude, achieving over a tenfold enhancement with an acquisition time of just <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$20 \mu ~\mathrm{s}$</tex>, enabled by the on-chip analog averaging feature. This noise reduction capability enables the detection of low-light signals, allowing the system to accurately measure optical pulses containing as few as 300 photoelectrons with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exceeding 10 and a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 200 ps.