To fully harness the revolutionary speed of the HILIGHT laser, a detector with equally groundbreaking capabilities is essential. A conventional detector would create a data bottleneck, making real-time, high-throughput imaging impossible. That is why the HILIGHT consortium is developing a novel digital sensor designed to not only keep pace with our versatile light source but also to capture the richest possible data with unparalleled efficiency.
The Challenge: A Flood of Photons
In an ultrafast imaging system like HILIGHT, the detector is bombarded with an immense number of photons in incredibly short time intervals. The challenge is twofold: first, to count these photons with extreme speed (at millions of pixels per second) and second, to extract meaningful time-resolved information without being overwhelmed by a torrent of data. Standard detection methods, which build a detailed timing histogram for every pixel, are simply too slow and data-intensive for applications like instant digital histopathology.
The HILIGHT Solution: A Smart and Sensitive Sensor
Led by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), our team is engineering a novel CMOS sensor specifically designed to resolve the data rate bottleneck and deliver superior performance.
Key Innovations of the HILIGHT Detector:
- Engineered for Extreme Speed: The detector is architected to operate at up to 8 million samples per second, perfectly synchronising with the HILIGHT laser and the fastest scanning microscopes. This ensures that no data is lost and that imaging can occur in near real-time.
- Intelligent On-Chip Processing: Instead of capturing every photon’s arrival time, which would generate an unmanageable amount of data, the HILIGHT sensor uses an innovative time-gated photon counting approach. It uses up to four precisely controlled and configurable time windows to sample the fluorescence signal. By intelligently binning the photon counts within these few gates, it can reconstruct the fluorescence lifetime while dramatically reducing the data readout requirements, thus resolving the bandwidth bottleneck.
- Exceptional Sensitivity and Image Quality: The sensor features a large array of Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs). This large array allows it to detect thousands of photons for each image pixel with a low risk of saturation, resulting in a very high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR).
- A Pathway to the Future: To push the boundaries of performance even further, the project includes the development of a second-generation, 3D-stacked hybrid detector. This advanced design separates the sensing and processing layers, promising even higher sensitivity, lower noise, and greater on-chip processing power.
This enabling sensor technology is the crucial second half of the HILIGHT system. Working in perfect synergy with our versatile laser source, it makes the project’s ambitious goals in rapid diagnostics and advanced biomedical research achievable.
HILIGHT 