Developments in Time-to-Digital Converters during 2020

Abstract

Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) are important devices in many systems, such as Time-of-Flight, frequency locking, nuclear experiments and metrology, and quantum versions of all these. Therefore, research into TDCs is important to bring these technologies to wider audiences. There was plenty of TDC innovation in 2020 despite the global pandemic, and in this review paper we summarise the research related to TDC architectures. We show four review and analysis papers, eight papers on application-specific integrated circuits, five papers on field-programmable gate arrays, one paper on discrete TDCs, and four papers on novel applications of the TDC core. This trend of excellent research looks set to continue into 2021, with 21 papers already mentioning TDC despite major conferences such as NoMeTDC and I2MTC not having occurred as of writing.