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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 60, NO. 2, APRIL 2013

A Novel Technique for the Stabilization of SiPM

Gain Against Temperature Variations
Francesco Licciulli, Ivano Indiveri, and Cristoforo Marzocca

AbstractIn several applications of Silicon Photo-Multipliers

(SiPM), drifts of the detector gain with the temperature represent a severe drawback which prevents from achieving optimal
performance. We propose an original technique to address this
issue, based upon the use of a SiPM not exposed to the light as
a temperature sensor. The average amplitude of the dark pulses
produced by this detector is measured and controlled to a constant
reference value by means of a negative feedback loop, which
automatically varies the bias voltage of the SiPM. The same bias
voltage variations generated by the feedback loop are also applied
to the sensitive SiPMs used in the specific application, thus making
constant their gain.
The effectiveness of the proposed compensation scheme has been
experimentally demonstrated by using two SiPMs from FBK-irst
(1 mm 1 mm, 400 micro-cells, breakdown voltage
),
one as temperature sensor involved in the negative feedback loop
and the other as light sensitive device. Both detectors have been
enclosed in a thermally isolated box with temperature varied in
the interval between 20
and 30 : the variation of the SiPM
gain can be reduced from more than 20%, without compensation,
to about 2%.
Index TermsGain control, negative feedback, SiPM, temperature compensation.

I. INTRODUCTION

EMARKABLE research efforts are devoted nowadays to

the development of applications in which the favorable
characteristics of Silicon Photo-Multiplier detectors (SiPM)
[1][3], for instance in terms of gain, timing accuracy and
ruggedness, are exploited for the detection of low light levels
[4], [5]. Even though, thanks to the Geiger mode of operation,
the gain sensitivity of a SiPM with respect to temperature
variations is significantly lower as compared to other kind of
solid state detectors, such as, for example, APDs, in several
cases the effects of gain drift due to temperature changes
seriously limit the optimal performance which can be achieved
in the specific application. Gain variations can cause undesired
shifts in the detected photo-peaks, which may compromise the
energy resolution of the detection system. Timing accuracy
can be also possibly affected by the excess timewalk generated
by variations in the amplitude of the signals provided by the
detector, caused by gain drift related to temperature changes.

Therefore, effective temperature compensation techniques must

be devised when the requirements of the specific application
call for an accurate control of the detector gain, especially when
direct control of the temperature to a constant value is costly or
unreliable.
The gain of the SiPM, i.e., the ratio between the total charge
generated by a single Geiger discharge and the elementary
charge, can be expressed as a function of its bias voltage
by means of the well known equation:
(1)
where
is the total capacitance of the elementary microcell of the device and
is its breakdown voltage. As a consequence, the temperature dependence of is mainly related to
the breakdown voltage, which is a linear function of the temperature [6], [7].
The most straightforward way to control the gain to a constant value in presence of temperature variations is to modify the
bias voltage of the detector accordingly, so that the overvoltage
is kept constant [8]. In the compensation
schemes presented in the literature a suitable sensor provides a
signal proportional to the temperature and, starting from this information, the needed variation of the bias voltage is obtained
and applied to the SiPM [9], [10].
We propose here a novel approach, in which the amplitude
of the dark pulses generated by a SiPM, of the same type of the
ones used as light detectors in the specific application, is used
to measure the variations of the detector gain as a function of
the temperature. Based on this information, a negative feedback
loop is established, which is able to provide automatically the
bias voltage variations needed to keep the gain constant.
The paper is organized as follows: in Section II, the temperature compensation solutions reported in the literature are discussed and the proposed closed loop compensation technique
is basically described; in Section III the details of the experimental setup which has been used to prove the feasibility and
the effectiveness of the proposed technique will be given, along
with the main results obtained; last, in Section IV the conclusions are drawn and some future perspectives are presented.
II. TEMPERATURE COMPENSATION OF THE SIPM GAIN

Manuscript received June 07, 2012; revised September 24, 2012; accepted
February 15, 2013. Date of current version April 10, 2013.
F. Licciulli and C. Marzocca are with the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, Politecnico di Bari, I70125 Bari, Italy (e-mail:
marzocca@poliba.it).
I. Indiveri is with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN),
Sezione di Bari, Bari, Italy (e-mail: ivanoindiveri@libero.it).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNS.2013.2249527

As pointed out above, the main cause of the gain drift with
the temperature for a SiPM is the temperature dependence of the
breakdown voltage, which is expressed by the following equation [7]:

0018-9499/$31.00 2013 IEEE

(2)

LICCIULLI et al.: NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR THE STABILIZATION OF SIPM

607

Fig. 2. The proposed temperature compensation technique: a possible

implementation.

Fig. 1. Schematic architecture of a classic compensation scheme for the temperature dependence of SiPM gain.

Typical values of the parameter are in the order of

.
From (1) and (2), the sensitivity of the gain with respect to the
temperature descends:
(3)
Different approaches can be found in the literature for compensating the gain drift [9], [10]. Essentially, they are based
on the active control of the SiPM bias voltage as a function of
the temperature. In these schemes, a sensor provides a voltage
signal
proportional to the actual temperature:
(4)
This voltage signal is then amplified by a suitable factor , so
that the thermal sensitivity of the resulting signal
matches
exactly the sensitivity of the breakdown voltage
. Eventually, the variations of the amplified signal are superimposed to
the bias voltage of the SiPM, for instance by controlling a power
supply source via a GPIB interface. In this way, the breakdown
voltage variations due to temperature drift are exactly compensated, thus making constant the SiPM gain. Fig. 1 illustrates the
basic principle of this technique.
In Fig. 1 the resistor
represents the input impedance of the
DC coupled front-end electronics used to read-out the detector.
The effectiveness of the described technique is limited by
some drawbacks: first of all the temperature-to-voltage characteristic of the used sensor must be linear, at least within the
foreseen temperature range of operation. Moreover the coefficients and , which define respectively the sensitivities of
the voltage generated by the sensor and the SiPM breakdown
voltage with respect to temperature variations, must be known
with sufficient accuracy. Also the gain of the amplifier block
must be controlled with good precision. Last, a variation of these
parameters due, for instance, to aging, may cause a non-optimal
behavior of the compensation system. To correct these effects,
long and complex calibration procedures must be applied, since
observation of the system behavior under temperature variations
is required to suitably adjust the tunable parameters.
The same considerations hold for a similar approach, in which
a thermistor is used as temperature sensor [11]. The bias voltage
of the detector, generated by a voltage divider which contains

the thermistor in one of its branches, is able to track the variations of the breakdown voltage, thus making the gain constant.
We propose an alternative solution, based on the direct measurement of the temperature dependence of the SiPM gain. Basically, let us consider a SiPM of the same kind of those used
in the considered application as light sensors and shield it from
any exposure to external photons. This blind SiPM will generate only dark pulses with amplitude approximately proportional to its gain. In fact, the resulting waveform associated to a
single dark pulse can be approximated as the response of a linear
system to a very short current pulse, i.e., a Diracs delta
,
which describes the current generated by the triggering of an
avalanche breakdown [12]. If the blind detector is in thermal
equilibrium with the sensitive devices, the amplitude of its dark
pulses will track the temperature variations according to the
temperature dependence of the SiPM gain [9].
In the proposed compensation scheme, the average value of
the dark pulse amplitude
is measured over an appropriate time interval in which the temperature can be considered
constant. Thus, a negative feedback loop is established around
the blind detector: the difference between
and a desired
reference value
is amplified and superimposed to the bias
voltage of the detector, as depicted schematically in Fig. 2. If the
loop gain is adequately large, in presence of temperature variations, the bias voltage is automatically adjusted by the feedback
loop so that the amplitude of the dark pulses is kept constantly
equal to the reference value, hence also the gain of the blind
SiPM does not vary. The same bias voltage variations generated by the feedback loop for the blind device are also applied
to the sensitive SiPMs, thus achieving the desired gain control.
For example, in the ideal arrangement shown in Fig. 2 the
amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the blind SiPM is
extracted by means of a peak detector and averaged by a lowpass filter, to obtain
.
If this kind of approach is used, the advantages of negative
feedback are fully exploited and there is no need of accurate
measurements of the temperature sensitivity of the breakdown
voltage, which is variable considering different SiPM manufacturers and even different lots of SiPMs of the same type. Moreover no special control of the amplifier gain is necessary and
the influence of parametric drifts of the system components can
be made negligible, thus avoiding the need of long and complicated calibration procedures, which involve an accurate control
of the temperature. The only requirement is that the blind SiPM
used as a temperature (or gain) sensor must be matched to the
detectors used as light sensors in the specific application.
Since the time constants of the temperature variations to be
compensated are usually very slow, no particular requirements

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must be imposed on the closed loop frequency response of the

feedback system. As a consequence, simple narrow-banding
techniques can be easily exploited to guarantee the stability of
the feedback loop. For instance, with reference to Fig. 2, the
system composed by the SiPM, the pulse peak detector and the
low-pass filter can be considered linear and a transfer function
relating
to
can be defined. If the cut-off
frequency of the low-pass filter is adequately reduced, the loop
gain presents only a dominant pole, thus system stability is
ensured.
The accuracy of the SiPM gain stabilization depends on the
total dc loop gain
, where is the gain of the amplifier
and is the dc value of the ratio
, i.e., the
sensitivity of the dark pulse amplitude to the variations of the
bias voltage, assuming that the dc gain of the low-pass filter is 1.
The feedback loop will be able to decrease the sensitivity of the
dark pulse amplitude with respect to the temperature by a factor
, which can be made conveniently large simply increasing
the amplifier gain.
An alternative implementation of the technique can be based
on direct measurements of the average value of the charge contained in the dark pulses of the SiPM used as temperature sensor.
The drawback of this solution is that it would require more complex electronics, since at least integration of the dark pulses,
management of the dc current of the blind SiPM, a reset mechanism and output baseline control for the integrator would be
needed.
PROOF OF PRINCIPLE: EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS
To prove the feasibility and the effectiveness of the temperature compensation principle described in the previous section,
an experimental system has been set up, in which the feedback
loop around the blind SiPM has been implemented in different
way with respect to the example shown in Fig. 2. This specific
implementation of the compensation technique is schematically
illustrated in Fig. 3 and is only intended as a proof of principle.
The system shown in Fig. 3 sets automatically the bias voltage
of the blind SiPM to the value
which yields an average
amplitude of the dark pulses equal to
, so it exploits the
same principle as the system of Fig. 2.
Using a power supply source equipped with a GPIB interface,
the value of the bias voltage
applied to the blind SiPM
is generated by a routine which runs on the host PC. For each
applied value of
, dark pulses generated by the SiPM
are acquired and their amplitude is extracted and averaged
by the host PC, obtaining the value
. Starting from an
initial value slightly greater than the breakdown voltage, the
software increases the bias voltage by a constant step
up to the final value
, for which
reaches the
reference value
, corresponding to the desired SiPM
gain. The STOP signal is thus generated and the procedure
starts over again from the initial value of
, yielding a
new value of
, automatically updated according to the
temperature variations. Thanks to another output of the power
supply source, the resulting final bias voltages
obtained
in each of the described measurement cycles are applied to
the sensitive SiPMs. The typical waveforms of the dark pulses

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 60, NO. 2, APRIL 2013

Fig. 3. Block diagram of the experimental setup used to prove the effectiveness
of the proposed temperature compensation principle.

generated by the blind detector for increasing values of

are also shown in the upper right part of Fig. 3.
The effectiveness of the described setup depends strongly
on the value chosen for the parameters
and . Concerning
, its value sets the minimum temperature variation
which can be ideally compensated. From (1) and
(2) it results that, to keep the SiPM gain constant in presence of
a temperature drift
, a variation of the bias voltage equal to
is required, thus we have:
(5)
At a given temperature, the estimation
of the average
amplitude of the dark pulse generated by the blind SiPM is affected by the number of samples used to calculate its value.
For instance, the effects of excess noise from the detector and
electronic noise from the measurement system can be reduced
if is increased. Optical cross talk and afterpulsing are further
sources of inaccuracies, but also is this case an increase of the
parameter is advantageous. In fact, neglecting all the other
sources of error and considering only the effects of optical cross
talk, if the average fraction of double dark pulses can be considered constant in the temperature range of operation and the
amplitude of the single dark pulse is
, the average value
of
is

which is proportional to
, i.e., to the SiPM gain. Thus, if
is conveniently increased, a good indicator of the SiPM gain is
still obtained also in presence of optical cross talk. Similar considerations can be done for what concerns afterpulsing, which,
by the way, affects the charge associated to a dark pulse much
more than its peak amplitude.
Since, in each of the measurement cycles of our setup, the bias
voltage can be varied only by steps
, to appreciate the
corresponding variation of the dark pulse amplitude

LICCIULLI et al.: NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR THE STABILIZATION OF SIPM

609

(where is a constant), in presence of all the mentioned sources of noise, the parameter should be set so that a
given signal to noise ratio SNR is guaranteed:

where
is the total variance of the measurement error
which affects
. As a consequence the minimum number
of samples to be considered should be:
(6)
Thus, if
is reduced to decrease
, the number
of samples
should be increased according to (6). In practice, once
has been set, the parameter
must be increased until each measurement cycle provides the same final
value
, at constant temperature.
Two 1 mm 1 mm SiPM of the same type, manufactured
by FBK-irst and composed by 400 micro-cells 50 m 50 m,
have been used in the experiments, one as blind SiPM and the
other as sensitive detector. The gain of the sensitive SiPM as
a function of the temperature has been also monitored via the
amplitude of its own dark pulses. Both detectors have been enclosed in a thermally isolated dark box and their temperature has
been controlled by means of a Peltier cell in the interval between
20
and 30 . Two AC-coupled transimpedance preamplifiers, with gain of about 2
and bandwidth of 20 MHz, based
on discrete BJTs, have been used to read-out the detectors. Temperature control via the Peltier cell, instrument control via GPIB
interface and all the data transfer and processing operations have
been managed by software routines which run on the same host
PC.
Since, due to limited resolution in the control of the Peltier
cell we have used, the minimum temperature variation which
can be reliably imposed to the system is
, (5)
yields
, knowing that
.
First, the temperature has been kept constant at
and a long series of measurement cycles have been carried out,
i.e., a series of ramps of
have been applied to the blind
SiPM, to find a suitable value for the parameter . According to
the previous considerations, the value of has been increased
until a constant
has been achieved, yielding
. In
Fig. 4 the values of
obtained considering the first ten
measurement cycles are shown. In these conditions, an average
value of 5.4 mV has been measured for
, with a standard deviation of 145
, so that the relative variation is about
2.7%. The amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the sensitive SiPM has been also monitored and similar results have been
obtained.
Considering Fig. 4, note that a complete measurement cycle,
which requires the acquisition of about 500 dark pulses, takes
about
to be completed, due to the speed limitations
introduced by the GPIB interface used to transfer the acquired
data from the oscilloscope to the PC. As a consequence, temperature variations slower than
can
be efficiently tracked by the system.

Fig. 4. Average amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the blind SiPM ob.
tained considering 10 measurement cycles at constant temperature

Fig. 5. Average amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the blind SiPM as a
function of its bias voltage, for each considered value of the temperature.

After this first test, five different values of temperature have

been considered in the range from 20 to 30 . The reference
value for the average amplitude of the dark pulses generated by
the blind SiPM has been set to
. For each temperature value a single measurement cycle has been considered,
i.e., a single ramp of
has been applied to the blind SiPM.
In Fig. 5 the values of
obtained for each temperature are
reported as a function of the bias voltage. The final bias voltage
of each ramp increases with the temperature, according to (3).
The control of the Peltier cell has been varied over time to
change the temperature in steps of 2.5 in the same range between 20 and 30 and the described temperature compensation system have been left free to evolve in time, so that measurement cycles are continuously applied to the blind SiPM. The
time needed to change the temperature between two different

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 60, NO. 2, APRIL 2013

Fig. 6. Bias voltage applied to the sensitive SiPM as a function of the

temperature.

values is about 30 s, whereas the system is able to update the

bias voltage of the sensitive SiPM in
.
The resulting bias voltages
applied to the sensitive
SiPM at the end of the thermal transients for each temperature
step are reported in Fig. 6 as a function of the temperature. The
results shown in Fig. 6 confirm that the temperature sensitivity
of the breakdown voltage is 40
.
Finally, in Fig. 7 the average amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the sensitive SiPM is reported as a function of the temperature, respectively in open loop conditions (i.e., without any
temperature compensation technique) and in closed loop, when
its bias voltage is automatically adjusted by the described compensation system. Considering a temperature variation of
around the center value
, the measured value of the
maximum relative variation of the dark pulse amplitude without
temperature compensation is more than
. The application of the proposed compensation scheme allows to achieve
a drastic limitation of this relative variation, which, in closed
loop, has been measured to be less than 2%: this result is dominated by the error which affects the measurement of the average
dark pulse, due to the limited number of acquired samples. If
intermediate values of the temperature are considered, i.e., if
temperature steps smaller than
are imposed,
the quantization error associated to the value chosen for
must be considered. The maximum amount of this error depends
on the variation of breakdown voltage
that the system
is not able to compensate, i.e.,
, and on the overvoltage
:
(7)
In our case, the overvoltage of the sensitive detector is about 2 V
and the maximum relative gain error given by (7) is around 5%,
but this value can be easily reduced by decreasing
and,
consequently,
, which was not possible in our setup, due
to the mentioned limitations in the temperature control system.
Note also that the two detectors used in the experiments are
characterized by a large breakdown voltage mismatch, but this

Fig. 7. Average amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the sensitive SiPM
as a function of the temperature, with (closed loop) and without (open loop)
temperature compensation.

does not affect the successful application of the compensation

technique, since it relies only on the matching between the temperature coefficients of the breakdown voltages, which is very
good.
III. CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
A novel technique for the compensation of the gain drift of
SiPM detectors caused by temperature variations has been proposed. In this approach a SiPM not exposed to incident photons
is exploited as temperature sensor and its gain is monitored by
measuring the amplitude of the dark pulses generated by the
detector. This detector is enclosed in a negative feedback loop,
which automatically modifies the bias voltage so that the amplitude of the dark pulses and, as a consequence, the gain are kept
constant in presence of temperature changes. One of the main
advantages of this technique is that, since it is based on a feedback loop, its application does not require an accurate knowledge of the detector parameters. The only requirement is that
the SiPM used as temperature sensor must have the same temperature sensitivity of the SiPMs used as light sensors in the
application.
The effectiveness of the proposed temperature compensation
principle has been demonstrated by means of a simple experimental setup. The application of the technique allows a remarkable reduction of the relative variation of the detector gain with
the temperature: the main sources of error and the parameters
which affect them have been also considered and discussed.
Since several ASICs designed to read-out SiPMs allow a fine
tuning of the detector bias voltage by means of a DAC [13],
[14], a possible development of the proposed technique can
be oriented to the exploitation of this feature for temperature
compensation purposes. Another interesting scenario which
deserves investigation is the design of SiPM arrays including
micro-cells clusters shielded from the incident photons, to be

LICCIULLI et al.: NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR THE STABILIZATION OF SIPM

used as temperature sensors within the proposed compensation scheme. Furthermore, alternative implementations of the
technique can be based on direct measurements of the detector
gain, i.e., of the average value of the charge contained in the
dark pulses generated by the blind SiPM: this approach could
results in complication of the required circuitry, but it could
possibly guarantee more accuracy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Dr. C. Piemonte, from
FBK-irst, for providing the SiPM samples used in the experiments, and prof. F. Corsi, DEE Politecnico di Bari, for helpful
discussions.
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