Low hardware consumption, resolution-configurable Gray code oscillator time-to-digital converters implemented in 16nm, 20nm and 28nm FPGAs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low hardware consumption, resolution-configurable Gray code oscillator TDC with automatic calibration, implemented in various FPGA technologies, achieving high resolution and linearity.

Contribution

It presents a novel FPGA-based TDC with a sampling matrix and virtual bin calibration for resolution configurability and automatic calibration.

Findings

Achieved 20.97 ps resolution in UltraScale+ FPGA

Demonstrated automatic calibration with VBCM

Implemented 16-channel TDC in three FPGA types

Abstract

This paper presents a low hardware consumption, resolution-configurable, automatically calibrating Gray code oscillator time-to-digital converter (TDC) in Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+, 20nm UltraScale and 28nm Virtex-7 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The proposed TDC has several innovations: 1) a sampling matrix to improve the resolution. 2) a virtual bin calibration method (VBCM) to realize resolution configuration and automatic calibration. 3) a hardware implementation of the VBCM in standard FPGA devices. We implemented and evaluated a 16-channel TDC system in all three FPGAs. The UltraScale+ version achieved the best resolution (least significant bit, LSB) of 20.97 ps with 0.09 LSB averaged peak-peak differential linearity (DNLpk-pk). The UltraScale and Virtex-7 versions achieved the best resolutions of 36.01 ps with 0.10 LSB averaged DNLpk-pk and 34.84 ps with 0.08 LSB averaged DNLpk-pk, respectively.