A nanosecond-resolution method of TDC implementation, based on time-to-time converters

Abstract

Time-to-time converters (TTCs), also called time expanders, represent a useful approach to measurement of small-time intervals. In short, their aim is to take a small-time interval, expand it in the order of thousand to tens of thousand times and measure the resulting interval. The usual way they are being used is as a single standalone unit, doing all the work in a consecutive order for different time variant sources. In this paper we propose a different approach, consisting of multiple TTCs working in parallel, being synchronized to the first incoming event.