During the past decade, many diagnostic instruments have
been developed that utilize electronic pulse dilation to achieve
temporal resolution in the sub-10 ps range. The motivation behind
these development efforts was the need for advanced diagnostics in
high-density physics experiments around the world. This technology
converts the signal of interest into a free electron cloud, which is
accelerated into a vacuum drift space. The acceleration potential
varies over time and causes axial velocity dispersion in the
electron cloud. This velocity dispersion is converted into time
separation after electrons pass through drift space. Then,
traditional time resolved methods were used to detect free
electrons, and the effective temporal resolution was magnified many
times. A gated microchannel plate (MCP) X-ray framing camera based
on pulse-dilation technology has been designed and manufactured in
the paper. Here, we discuss design details and applications of these
instruments. The temporal resolution measured without using
broadening technology is approximately 78 ps. When the excitation
pulse is applied to the PC, the pulse dilation technique is used to
increase the measured temporal resolution to 9 ps. The propagation
speed of gated pulses in MCP microstrip lines was measured using
fiber bundle method, which is approximately
1.8 × 108 m/s.