Single Photon Source Driver Designed in ASIC

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated ASIC chip, LSD2018, designed to drive 1550nm DFB lasers for single photon sources, significantly reducing size and complexity for quantum key distribution systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces a fully integrated ASIC for laser driving in QKD, combining multiple functions into one chip to miniaturize the photon source system.

Findings

ASIC successfully drives 1550nm DFB lasers with adjustable pulse parameters.

Simulation results validate the chip design before fabrication.

The integrated design reduces size and complexity of the photon source system.

Abstract

The single photon source is an important part of the quantum key distribution (QKD) system. At present, the single photon source is large in size and complex in structure for a lot of discrete components which are used. The miniaturization of the photon source is the tendency of the QKD system. We integrate all laser driver electronic module into one single ASIC chip, which can be used to drive the 1550nm DFB laser in random pulse mode and it can greatly reduce the volume of the single photon source. We present the design of the chip named LSD2018 and simulation results before the tape-out. The LSD2018 is fabricated with a 130 nm CMOS process and consists of a discriminator, an adjustable pulse generator, a bandgap reference, an SPI bus, and an amplitude-adjustable current pulse driver. The electronic random pulse from the driver can go 20mA to 120mA in amplitude and 400ps to 4ns in pulse width. The parameters can be set by an SPI bus.