Precision time management

Precision Time Management

Measuring time intervals with picosecond resolution is found in many applications, LIDAR being certainly the best known one. But others like tomography, communication, spectroscopy or magnetrostrictive position sensing also go for picoseconds. The Time-to-Digital Converters (abbreviated to TDC) from ScioSense offer the ideal platform for these systems.

The all-digital integrated circuits are based on buffer delay times and can be manufactured using standard CMOS process technologies. Compensation methods for temperature and voltage variation guarantee high stability and repeatability. In comparison to analog measurement methods, the main advantages of digital TDCs are high measurement rates, excellent pulse-pair resolution, and low power dissipation. 

ScioSense TDC products offer resolution as high as 10ps for a single shot, and some devices can achieve sampling rates as high as 35 Msamples/channel. 

Offering multiple channel outputs and multi-hit measurement capability down to 5 ns, these TDCs are ideal for LIDAR range-finding and medical imaging applications.

Precision Time Measurement - Time-to-digital converters

Channels

1 Start, 2 Stop, REFCLK

4 Stop, REFCLK

2 Stop, REFCLK

4 Stop, REFCLK

1 Start, 8 Stop, REFCLK

Inputs

LVDS, CMOS

LVDS, CMOS

LVDS, CMOS

CMOS

LCPECL, LVTTL

Interface

Quad SPI

LVDS, SPI

LVDS, SPI

SPI

28b parallel

Resolution [ps]

25

10, 20

10, 20

20

10, 81

Pulse-to-pulse [ns]

2.5

5

5

5

6

Sample rate [Hz]

50 M / chip

35 M / channel

35 M / channel

1.5 M / chip

40 M / chip

Package

QFN48

QFN48

QFN48

QFN32

TQFP100