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Register a new userA Fast Improved Fat Tree Encoder for Wave Union TDC in an FPGA
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Up to the present, the wave union method can achieve the best timing performance in FPGA based TDC designs. However, it should be guaranteed in such a structure that the non-thermometer code to binary code (NTH2B) encoding process should be finished within just one system clock cycle. So the implementation of the NTH2B encoder is quite challenging considering the high speed requirement. Besides, the high resolution wave union TDC also demands the encoder to convert an ultra-wide input code to a binary code. We present a fast improved fat tree encoder (IFTE) to fulfill such requirements, in which bubble error suppression is also integrated. With this encoder scheme, a wave union TDC with 7.7 ps RMS and 3.8 ps effective bin size was implemented in an FPGA from Xilinx Virtex 5 family. An encoding time of 8.33 ns was achieved for a 276-bit non-thermometer code to a 9-bit binary code conversion. We conducted a series of tests on the oscillating period of the wave union launcher, as well as the overall performance of the TDC; test results indicate that the IFTE works well. In fact, in the implementation of this encoder, no manual routing or special constrains were required; therefore, this IFTE structure could also be further applied in other delay chain based FPGA TDCs.
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A high precision and high resolution time-to-digital converter (TDC) implemented in a 40 nm fabrication process Virtex-6 FPGA is presented in this paper. The multi-chain measurements averaging architecture is used to overcome the resolution limitation determined by intrinsic cell delay of the plain single tapped-delay chain. The resolution and precision are both improved with this architecture. In such a TDC, the input signal is connected to multiple tapped-delay chains simultaneously (the chain number is M), and there is a fixed delay cell between every two adjacent chains. Each tapped-delay chain is just a plain TDC and should generate a TDC time for a hit input signal, so totally M TDC time values should be got for a hit signal. After averaging, the final TDC time is obtained. A TDC with 3 ps resolution (i.e. bin size) and 6.5 ps precision (i.e. RMS) has been implemented using 8 parallel tapped-delay chains. Meanwhile the plain TDC with single tapped-delay chain yields 24 ps resolution and 18 ps precision.
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