• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.484-492
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• 2023

Time-to-digital converters (TDCs) based on the tapped delay line (TDL) architecture have been widely used in various applications requiring a precise time measurement. However, the poor uniformity of the propagation delays in the TDL implemented on FPGA leads to bubble error and large nonlinearity of the TDC. The purpose of this study was to develop an advanced TDC architecture capable of minimizing the bubble errors and improving the linearity. To remove the bubble errors, the decimated delay line (DDL) architecture was implemented on the UltraScale + FPGA; meanwhile, to improve the linearity of the TDC, a histogram uniformization (HU) and multi-chain TDL (MCT) methods were developed and implemented on the FPGA. The integral nonlinearities (INLs) and differential nonlinearities (DNLs) of the plain TDCs with the 'HU method' (HU TDC) and with 'both HU and MCT methods' (HU-MCT TDC) were measured and compared to those of the TDC with 'DDL alone' (plain TDC). The linearity of HU-MCT TDC were superior to those of the plain TDC and HU TDC. The experiment results indicated that HU-MCT TDC developed in this study was useful for improving the linearity of the TDC, which allowed for high timing resolution to be achieved.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.9
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• pp.182-189
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• 2014

A tapped delay line time-to-digital converter (TDC) can be easily implemented using internal carry chains in a field-programmable gate array, and hence, its use is widespread. However, the tapped delay line TDC suffers from performance degradation because of differences in the delay times of dedicated carry chains. In this paper, a dual edge measurement method is proposed instead of a typical step signal to the delay cell to compensate for the performance degradation caused by wide-delay cells in carry chains. By applying a pulse of a fixed width as an input to the carry chains and using the time information between the up and down edges of the signal pulse, the timing accuracy can be increased. Two dedicated carry chain sites are required for the dual edge measurements. By adopting the proposed dual edge measurement method, the average delay widths of the two carry chains were improved by more than 35%, from 17.3 ps and 16.7 ps to 11.2 ps and 10.1 ps, respectively. In addition, the maximum delay times were improved from 41.4 ps and 42.1 ps to 20.1 ps and 20.8 ps, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.8
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• pp.156-164
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• 2014

In a delay line type of a time-to-digital converter implemented in Field Programmable Gate Array, the timing accuracy decreases for a longer carry chain. In this paper, we propose a structure that has a multi-phase clock and a state machine to check metastability; this would reduce the required length of the carry chain with the same time resolution. To reduce the errors caused by the time difference in the four delay lines associated with a four-phase clock, the proposed TDC generates a single input pulse from four phase clocks and uses a single delay line. Moreover, the state machine is designed to find the phase clock that is used to generate the single input pulse and determine the metastable state without a synchronizer. With the measurement range of 1 ms, the measured resolution was 22 ps, and the non-linearity was 25 ps.