High concentration factor diffractive microlenses integrated with CMOS single-photon avalanche diode detector arrays for fill-factor improvement

Large-format single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays often suffer from low fill-factors – the ratio of the active area to the overall pixel area. The detection efficiency of these detector arrays can be vastly increased with the integration of microlens arrays designed to concentrate incident light onto the active areas and may be refractive or diffractive in nature. The ability of diffractive optical elements (DOEs) to efficiently cover a square or rectangular pixel, combined with their capability of working as fast lenses (i.e. ∼f/3) makes them versatile and practical lens designs for use in sparse photon applications using micro-scale, large format detector arrays. Binary mask based photolitography was employed to fabricate fast diffractive microlenses for two designs of 32 x 32 SPAD detector arrays, each design having a different pixel pitch and fill-factor. A spectral characterization of the lenses is performed, as well as analysis of performance under different illumination conditions from wide- to narrow-angle illumination (i.e. f/2 to f/22 optics). The performance of the microlenses presented exceeds previous designs in terms of both concentration factor (i.e. increase in light collection capability), and lens speed. Concentration factors greater than 33x are achieved, for focal lengths in the substrate material as short as 190 μm, representing a microlens f-number of 3.8 and providing a focal spot diameter of < 4 μm. These results were achieved while retaining an extremely high degree of performance uniformity across the 1024 devices in each case, which demonstrates the significant benefits to be gained by the implementation of DOEs as part of an integrated detector system using SPAD arrays with very small active areas.