A High-Sensitivity and Low-Walk Error LADAR Receiver for Military Application

An integrated receiver with high sensitivity and low walk error for a military purpose pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) LADAR system is proposed. The proposed receiver adopts a dual-gain capacitive-feedback TIA (C-TIA) instead of widely used resistive-feedback TIA (R-TIA) to increase the sensitivity. In addition, a new walk-error improvement circuit based on a constant-delay detection method is proposed. Implemented in 0.35 μm CMOS technology, the receiver achieves an input-referred noise current of 1.36 pA/√Hz with bandwidth of 140 MHz and minimum detectable signal (MDS) of 10 nW with a 5 ns pulse at SNR=3.3, maximum walk-error of 2.8 ns, and a dynamic range of 1:12,000 over the operating temperature range of -40°C to +85°C.