Ultra-compact 32-channel system for time-correlated single-photon counting measurements

Modern Time-Correlated Single-Photon Counting applications require to detect spectral and temporal fluorescence data simultaneously and from different areas of the analyzed sample. These rising quests have led the development of multichannel systems able to perform high count rate and high performance analysis. In this work we describe a new 32-channel TCSPC system designed to be used in modern setups. The presented module consists of four independent 8-channel TCSPC boards, each of them including two 4-channel Time-Amplitude Converter arrays. These TAC arrays are built-in 0.35 mu m Si-Ge BiCMOS technology and are characterized by low crosstalk, high resolution, high conversion rate and variable full-scale range. The 8-channel TCSPC board implements an 8-channel ADC to sample the TAC outputs, an FPGA to record and organize the measurement results and a USB 2.0 interface to enable real-time data transmission to and from an external PC. Experimental results demonstrate that the acquisition system ensures high performance TCSPC measurements, in particular: high conversion rate (5 MHz), good time resolution (down to 30 ps(FWHM) with the full scale range set to 11 ns) and low differential non-linearity (rms value lower than 0.15% of the time bin width). We design the module to be very compact and, thanks to the reduced dimensions of the 8-channel TCSPC board (95x40 mm), the whole system can be enclosed in a small aluminum case (160x125x30 mm).