Modeling of a sensitive time-of-flight flash LiDAR system

Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) is a remote-sensing technique that is an integral part of almost any autonomous vehicle, or robot. It is used for monitoring and profiling structures, range, velocity, vibration, and air turbulence. Remote sensing in the IR region has several advantages over the visible region, including higher transmitter energy while maintaining eye-safety requirements. Electron-injection detectors are a new class of detectors with high internal avalanche-free amplification together with an excess-noise-factor of unity. They have a cutoff wavelength of 1700 nm. Furthermore, they have an extremely low jitter. The detector operates in linear-mode and requires only bias voltage of a few volts. This together with the feedback stabilized gain mechanism, makes formation of large-format high pixel density electron-injection FPAs less challenging compared to other detector technologies such as avalanche photodetectors. These characteristics make electron-injection detectors an ideal choice for flash LiDAR application with mm scale resolution at longer ranges. Based on our experimentally measured device characteristics, a detailed theoretical LiDAR model was developed. In this model we compare the performance of the electron-injection detector with commercially available linear-mode InGaAs APD from (Hamamatsu G8931-20) as well as a p-i-n diode (Hamamatsu 11193 p-i-n). Flash LiDAR images obtained by our model, show the electron-injection detector array (of 100 x 100 element) achieves better resolution with higher signal-to-noise compared with both the InGaAs APD and the p-i-n array (of 100 x 100 element).