A 250-ps time-resolution CMOS multihit time-to-digital converter for nuclear physics experiments

Abstract

This paper presents a CMOS realization of a time-to-digital converter (TDC) for nuclear physics experiments. An innovative and robust architecture, already used in a previous TDC version with 1 ns of bin size, has been adopted and improved with the aim to achieve a 500-ps bin size. The TDC has eight input channels plus a common channel. It can store up to 32 events per channel with a double-hit resolution of 8 ns. It can realize common-start and common-stop operations. It has 4.2 ms of input range with a 125-MHz system clock, The chip uses an asynchronous interpolator system based on a delay-locked Line to increase the coarse resolution. It has been fabricated in a double-metal single poly n-well, 1-mu m CMOS process with an area of about 77 mm(2). Measurements show that the TDC has better performance compared to similar devices, especially the time resolution below 250 ps

A 17ps time-to-digital converter implemented in 65nm FPGA technology

“…For instance, in metrological applications, high throughput has the effect of achieving the wanted accuracy in a shorter time, thus improving the speed of a measurement or making it possible to achieve unprecedented accuracies whenever a phenomenon is fast occurring. Similar advantages could be achieved in RADARs, high-energy physics, and time-resolved imaging [4,5].…”

Integrated High-Resolution Multi-Channel Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) for PET Imaging

“…An analog TDC consists of a time-to-amplitude converter (TAC) and a high-resolution high-speed ADC, which were introduced in Tanaka et al (1991); Bigongiari et al (1999); Napolitano et al (2010). The architecture of such a TDC is illustrated in Figure 2.…”

A 22-bit 110ps time-interpolated Time-to-Digital Converter

“…However, there is an increasing interest nowadays to integrate TDCs in various imaging platforms to replace ADCs for time-resolve biochemical sensing or high speed imaging applications. These applications include: (1) High energy physics [1] or space science instrumentations, where highspeed space imaging of X-ray and other high energy particles is performed; (2) Medical imaging applications using positron emission tomography [2]; (3) Rang finding and 3D imaging using laser radar [3] or single-photon counting [4] technique for time-of-flight measurement. For such applications, TDCs with wide dynamic range and high throughput readout are usually desirable for high performance and high frame rate imaging implementations.…”