A high performance constant fraction discriminator for pulsed laser proximity fuze

A novel high performance timing discrimination circuit architecture for a pulsed laser proximity fuze based on constant fraction discrimination technique is constructed and tested. A LC resonant circuit is designed to replace the traditional transmission delay-line to accommodate the special requirements of laser proximity fuze for low size, power consumption, weight and cost. The walk error of the improved constant fraction discriminator is analyzed with lots of detailed experiments. The experiment results indicate that the discriminator eliminates the dependency of the echo pulse amplitude from the timing result, the walk error caused by the amplitude variation and the noise variation of the received echo pulse is less than 125ps, when the SNR is more than 20 and the echo pulse is 0.2V to 2.134V (20.12dB dynamic range). The error is less than 100ps when the SNR more than 60. Furthermore, Detection on the whole system integrating the timing discrimination circuit verifies that, the laser repetition frequency can reach 10 KHz, the accuracy of the system with a measurement time of 0.1ms is 1.45cm in the case of a noncooperative target at a measurement range from 2m to 24m at room temperature, which improve greatly the fixed distance precision of pulsed laser proximity fuze.