Afterpulsing effects in SPAD-based photon-counting communication system

Abstract Afterpulsing is a critical non-ideal factor of SPAD at telecommunication wavelength, which limits its performance. In order to evaluate the effects of afterpulsing, a new bit error rate (BER) model of SPAD-based photon-counting communication system including afterpulsing is built. To verify the theoretical model, an experimental system is founded. Compared with experimental results, the new BER model is found to be in good agreement. Based on the new BER model, the error performance of photon-counting communication system is investigated. The results indicate that maintaining the afterpulsing probability (AP) of 0, 0.1 will bring 1.2 to 3-dB sensitivity benefit than AP of 0.25. Maintaining the total number of gates per bit above 20 can significantly improve the system sensitivity or background tolerance. Inhibiting the AP below 0.1 is critical for expanding the scale of SPADs array to enhance system error performance.