A low-power front-end with on-chip fast pulse generation and customized 10-bit single-ended
SAR ADC is developed for SiPM readout design. The on-chip fast pulse generation improves
the timing resolution without the need of extra I/O pins. The proposed SAR ADC, reusing the
SiPM charge integrator and eliminating the power-hungry charging sensitive amplifier,
consumes significantly less power compared with conventional solutions. Designed in a 0.18 μm
1P6M bulk CMOS technology, the front-end contains 16 channels of SiPM readouts, and each
channel consumes a power of 3.8 mW. With on-chip HPF to shape input signals, the fast pulse
generation approach reduces the long-tailed SPE pulses width from 50 ns to 3 ns. At 16 MS/s,
the SAR ADC consumes 743 μW from a 1.8 V supply and achieves a SNDR of 57.53 dB and a
SFDR of 66.31 dB, respectively.