A saw-tooth wave based design of time to digital converter

We propose an alternative approach for time interpolation of TDC in which a saw-tooth wave is generated instead of using sinusoidal wave in [10]. The proposed approach avoids floating number operation as well as lowers the dependency on analog passive components. Since the differential portion of two projected signals is amplified in the interpolation circuit, the wider range of time interval can be measured while preserving a few picoseconds resolution. It is also expected that the computational burden of DSP is decreased as well as its repeatability is enhanced. Compared with the conventional analog interpolation approach, the proposed saw-tooth based interpolation TDC overcomes the drawbacks of conventional analog interpolation TDC by reducing the dependency on passive components which are sensitive to environment and operational conditions. It provides high repeatability and linearity property within a wide range of operation with high resolution of measurement. With the aid of proposed interpolation circuit, a practical TDC and its embedded measurement system are expected to be implemented. The experiment results demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness for practical usage with a simple and low cost implementation.

[1]  Gordon W. Roberts,et al.  Embedded Measurement of GHz Digital Signals With Time Amplification in CMOS , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[2]  Jingshown Wu,et al.  A low power high accuracy CMOS time-to-digital converter , 1997, Proceedings of 1997 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. Circuits and Systems in the Information Age ISCAS '97.

[3]  Keunoh Park,et al.  Time-to-digital converter of very high pulse stretching ratio for digital storage oscilloscopes , 1999 .

[4]  H. Kurashige,et al.  A high resolution TDC in TKO box system , 1988 .

[5]  Timo Rahkonen,et al.  A high resolution digital CMOS time-to-digital converter based on nested delay locked loops , 1999, ISCAS'99. Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems VLSI (Cat. No.99CH36349).

[6]  J. Kostamovaara,et al.  A CMOS time-to-digital converter with better than 10 ps single-shot precision , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[7]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  Pulsed time-of-flight laser radar module with millimeter-level accuracy using full custom receiver and TDC ASICs , 2002, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[8]  K. Karadamoglou,et al.  An 11-bit high-resolution and adjustable-range CMOS time-to-digital converter for space science instruments , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[9]  F. Zappa,et al.  Monolithic time-to-digital converter with 20ps resolution , 2003, ESSCIRC 2004 - 29th European Solid-State Circuits Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03EX705).

[10]  M. Tanaka,et al.  Development of monolithic time-to-amplitude converter for high precision TOF measurement , 1990 .

[11]  Juha Kostamovaara,et al.  A high-precision time-to-digital converter for pulsed time-of-flight laser radar applications , 1998, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[12]  J. M. Rochelle,et al.  Current-mode time-to-amplitude converter for precision sub-nanosecond measurement , 1992, IEEE Conference on Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging.

[13]  M. L. Lampton,et al.  A HIGH-SPEED WIDE DYNAMIC RANGE TIME-TO-DIGITAL CONVERTER , 1994 .

[14]  I. Nissinen,et al.  Time-to-Digital Converter based on an On-chip Voltage Reference Locked Ring Oscillator , 2006, 2006 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Proceedings.

[15]  J. J. Williams,et al.  High-precision TDC in an FPGA using a 192 MHz quadrature clock , 2002, 2002 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record.

[16]  J. Kostamovaara,et al.  An integrated time-to-digital converter with 30-ps single-shot precision , 2000, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.