ABSTRACT
A time-to-digital converter (TDC) maps a time variable to a digital code. TDCs are perhaps the most important building blocks of time-mode circuits. Although the deployment of TDCs in particles and high-energy physics for time-of-flight measurement in nuclear science dates back to 1970s [1,2], they have found a broad spectrum of emerging applications such as digital storage oscillators [3,4], laser
3.3.5Vernier Delay Line TDCs ...................................................................54 3.3.5.1 Basic Vernier Delay Line TDCs ..........................................54 3.3.5.2 Hierarchical Vernier Delay Line TDCs ............................... 56 3.3.5.3Fractional Difference Conversion Vernier Delay
Line TDCs ........................................................................... 57 3.3.5.4Two-L Vernier Delay Line TDCs ........................................ 59 3.3.5.5 Cyclic Vernier Delay Line TDCs ......................................... 59 3.3.5.6 Cyclic Vernier Delay Line TDCs with Fractional
Difference Conversion .........................................................60 3.3.5.7 Two-Dimensional Vernier Delay Line TDCs ...................... 61
3.3.6Pulse-Stretching TDCs ....................................................................... 63 3.3.6.1Pulse-Stretching TDCs with Analog-to-Digital Conversion .......65 3.3.6.2Dual-Slope Pulse-Stretching TDCs .....................................65 3.3.6.3 Delay-Locked Loop Pulse-Stretching TDCs ....................... 67 3.3.6.4 Nakura Pulse-Stretching TDCs ...........................................69 3.3.6.5Regeneration Time Amplification TDCs ............................. 70
3.3.7Pulse-Shrinking TDCs ....................................................................... 74 3.3.7.1 Uniform Pulse-Shrinking TDCs .......................................... 74 3.3.7.2Cyclic Pulse-Shrinking TDCs ............................................. 75 3.3.7.3 Cyclic Pulse-Shrinking TDCs with Temperature
Compensation...................................................................... 78 3.3.8Successive Approximation TDCs .......................................................80 3.3.9Flash TDCs ......................................................................................... 83 3.3.10Pipelined Time-to-Digital Converters ................................................ 83
3.4 Noise-Shaping Time-to-Digital Converters .................................................... 83 3.4.1Gated Ring Oscillator TDCs ..............................................................85 3.4.2Vernier Gated Ring Oscillator TDCs .................................................90 3.4.3Two-Step Gated Ring Oscillator TDCs .............................................. 91 3.4.4Two-Dimensional Vernier Gated Ring Oscillator TDCs ...................93 3.4.5 Gated Relaxation Oscillator TDCs .....................................................95 3.4.6Switched Ring Oscillator TDCs .........................................................96 3.4.7 MASH TDCs ......................................................................................98
