Abstract
In this chapter architectural aspects of time-to-digital converters are discussed in detail. The design challenges are a high dynamic range, small offset and gain error, high linearity, a small die area, and finally a low power consumption. The time resolution is independently addressed in Chapter 5. Several architectures are proposed that particularly focus on at least one of the design challenges. A bipolar TDC allows for signed measurement without offset error. A loop architecture enables long measurement times with reasonable area consumption. A linear loop extension improves the linearity impairments of the basic loop architecture. For long measurement times a hierarchical TDC system can further reduce the power consumption. For complex measurement tasks that would require multiple time-todigital converters a multi-event TDC can be used to reduce the number of converters and to improve matching. An on-chip measurement and characterization engine allows for low cost TDC characterization. Finally, a time domain quantizer is discussed that maps a discrete valued continuous time signal to a discrete time raster.
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© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
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Henzler, S. (2010). Advanced TDC Design Issues. In: Time-to-Digital Converters. Springer Series in Advanced Microelectronics, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8628-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8628-0_4
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Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-8627-3
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-8628-0
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