Abstract
Today’s optical range finders or 3D imagers suffer from significant drawbacks and do not allow to combine performance (sensitivity, precision) with simplicity, and scalability enabling very-large scale integration with minimum footprint. Here, we present the amorphous silicon Intrinsic Photomixing Detector (IPD) for direct and highly sensitive optical envelope mixing. The ability to generate a photocurrent that is proportional to the nonlinear mixing of two optical modulation envelope functions enables high performance Time-of-Flight optical ranging at low light levels down to ~ 0.1 mWcm−2 at 444 nm. The IPD exceeds MHz bandwidth, covers a broad distance detection range from 10 cm to 101 m, and achieves a mean depth resolution below 44 mm for distances up to 25 m. The IPD paves the way towards simple but high-performance photodetectors that allow for very-large scale integration on top of silicon or flexible electronics at low costs with pixel fill factors up to 100%.