Thesis

Strategies towards high performance (high-resolution/linearity) time-to-digital converters on field-programmable gate arrays

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2023
Thesis identifier
  • T16661
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201864946
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Qualification Name
Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technology has become popular in scientific research and industrial applications, such as high-energy physics, bio-sensing, non-invasion health monitoring, and 3D imaging. Because of the increasing demand for high-precision time measurements, time-to-digital converters (TDCs) have attracted attention since the 1970s. As a fully digital solution, TDCs are portable and have great potential for multichannel applications compared to bulky and expensive time-to-amplitude converters (TACs). A TDC can be implemented in ASIC and FPGA devices. Due to the low cost, flexibility, and short development cycle, FPGA-TDCs have become promising. Starting with a literature review, three original FPGA-TDCs with outstanding performance are introduced. The first design is the first efficient wave union (WU) based TDC implemented in Xilinx UltraScale (20 nm) FPGAs with a bubble-free sub-TDL structure. Combining with other existing methods, the resolution is further enhanced to 1.23 ps. The second TDC has been designed for LiDAR applications, especially in driver-less vehicles. Using the proposed new calibration method, the resolution is adjustable (50, 80, and 100 ps), and the linearity is exceptionally high (INL pk-pk and INL pk-pk are lower than 0.05 LSB). Meanwhile, a software tool has been open-sourced with a graphic user interface (GUI) to predict TDCs’ performance. In the third TDC, an onboard automatic calibration (AC) function has been realized by exploiting Xilinx ZYNQ SoC architectures. The test results show the robustness of the proposed method. Without the manual calibration, the AC function enables FPGA-TDCs to be applied in commercial products where mass production is required.
Advisor / supervisor
  • Li, David Day Uei
Resource Type
DOI

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