Design of high-resolution and wide-range time-to-digital converter

Abstract

Time digital conversion technology has been widely used in the field of measurement technology. A high-resolution, widerange Time-to-Digital-Converter (TDC) circuit is proposed based on Multiplier Delay-Locked Loop (MDLL) and Time Amplifier (TA). In this paper, a two-segment combination structure is adopted to obtain a wide range by using the cycle counting method in the high segment, and to take into account the high resolution by using the time amplification technique in the middle and low segments. Finally, a TDC circuit with a range of 500 ps ~ 4 us and a resolution of 18 ps is presented.