A 9 Bit, 3.6 ps Resolution Pipeline Time-to-Digital Converter

This paper describes a 9-bit time-to-digital converter (TDC) with 3.6 ps resolution. The resolution of 3.6 ps is achieved using coarse and fine structure. The structure of the proposed two-step pipeline TDC is composed of a 4-bit coarse TDC (CTDC) based on delay line and a 5-bit fine TDC (FTDC) based on an SAR-CD algorithm where a Time Amplifier (TA) is used between them. Since TA amplifies the time intervals in different stages of delay line to achieve accurate gain with wide linear range. Therefore, the TDC has good linearity. The proposed TDC has Differential Non-Linearity (DNL) and Integral Non-Linearity (INL) errors of 1.6 and 2.6 LSB, respectively. This TDC was designed in 0.18 mu m CMOS technology. Using a supply voltage of 1.8 V, the proposed TDC consumes 1.88 mW at 25 MS/s throughput.