Simulation of time-of-flight sensors for evaluation of chip layout variants

Abstract

Simulation of time-of-flight (ToF) sensors has mainly been used to evaluate depth data processing algorithms, and existing approaches, therefore, focus on the generation of realistic depth data. Thus, current approaches are of limited usefulness for studying alternatives in sensor chip design, since this application area has different requirements. We propose a new physically based simulation model with a focus on realistic and practical sensor parameterization. The model is suitable for implementation on massively parallel processors such as graphics processing units, to allow fast simulation of many sensor frames across a wide range of parameter sets for meaningful evaluation. We use our implementation to evaluate two alternative approaches in continuous-wave ToF sensor design.