Introduction

In this section I will describe some details about the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 design as well as about the test setup employed for its characterization. This TDC was produced with UMC 110 nm technology. The whole system can be divided into three hierarchical blocks:

1. The TDC V1 SW 28 10 19. This is the TDC design we are interested in.
2. The test structure. This is the circuit implemented in the silicon which contains four identical TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 replicas and peripheral circuitry for the operation.
3. The test setup. This is the whole measuring system composed of a Raspberry Pi, an FPGA, a specialized short-delay generation system and the test structure itself.

The TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 circuit

In it is shown the simplified block diagram of the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 circuit. The heart of the circuit is the ring of inverters, highlighted in yellow. This is a closed path with an odd number of inverters, 21 in this case, which makes it an oscillator. As seen, the first of the inverters is a NAND gate, allowing to start or stop the oscillation. There is also a second chain of identical inverters, highlighted in green, which is not closed. This line has an extra inverter in the beginning. Additionally, there is a set of 21 memories, called SAFF_cell in the diagram, which are differential D flip-flopsThis flip-flop was specifically designed for this application., that basically store the difference of their inputs when STOP signal is received. Finally, there is a 7 bit counter attached to the output of the last inverter in the non closed chain.

Simplified block diagram of the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 design. In red the two input signals START and STOP and in blue the two output buses SAFF and COUNT.

The working principle

The working principle of this circuit is simple. Initially both START and STOP signals are at a low value. In this case the ring of inverters (yellow) is in the state 1010...01 and the non closed chain (green) in state 0101...10. The circuit is in a stationary state. When the START changes to a high state the NAND gate becomes a NOT gate and the state of the ring (yellow) is not stable anymore. It starts to oscillate by propagating a "wave of identical consecutive states", i.e. first it changes to 0010...01, after the propagation time it changes to 0110...01, and so on. The same happens with the non closed (green) chain of inverters. Each time the output of the last inverter in the non closed (green) chain commutes, the counter increments in one, registering a complete loop in the ring of inverters. In some moment in time the STOP signal changes to a high state and in this moment the state of the two chains of inverters is freezed by the SAFF_cell modules and the counter stops counting. Thus, the status of the circuit is freezed. By knowing the propagation time of the NOT gates, the conversion from the state to a time is direct and a measurement of time between the START and STOP signals is obtained.

Note that each of the SAFF_cell blocks in has the inputs switched. As far as I know the only reason for this is to have a "more beautiful" reading in the SAFF bus. For example, instead of having an output of the form 0101101... we invert each odd bit and this becomes 0000111.... In this way it is easier to visualize in which position "the wave" is.

The test structure

The test structure implemented, i.e. the piece of silicon, contains four identical replicas of the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 circuit. The (simplified) block diagram of the test structure is shown in . As can be seen all the TDCs share the same START and STOP signals, and the only additional circuitry is a mechanism to select each of the four outputs via the SEL selection bus. This selection is done during the readout process, time after the time measurement has finished.

Simplified block diagram of the test structure implemented. The test structure contains four identical replicas of the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 design which block diagram is shown in .

The test setup

Finally, in this section I will describe the outermost block which is the test setup. A simplified block diagram is shown in . In the rightmost part we find the test structure, described previously. Next, going from right to left, we find the delay module which is a board that contains two SY89296 delay chips. This delay module provides the START and STOP signals with an arbitrary delay between -10 ns and 10 ns in steps smaller than 10 ps and fluctuations smaller than 5 ps (more details will be given in ). The rest of the signals from the test structure interface directly with an FPGA which was specifically configured for this applicationFor the record, the code used to program the FPGA for this work can be found in this repo, specifically in the commit fe27162759e35888a1b5c73677af94f15d5e2ab5.. The FPGA is controlled by a Raspberry Py which runs software developed specifically for this workAgain, for the record, the code used in the Raspberry Pi can be found in this repo in the commit 24143785a4c96a2dd802be2f7d97497134f91e5e.. The last element in the test setup, in the leftmost part, is me 🤓.

Simplified block diagram of the test setup. The block diagram of the test structure is shown in .

Test setup calibration

Before proceeding with the characterization of the test structure a calibration procedure was performed. The setup was placed in a laboratoryOur lab at G floor. with the ambient temperature controlled during the complete period of both calibration (of test setup) and characterization (of test structure). For this calibration, the test structure was replaced by an oscilloscopeLeCroy WaveRunner 640Zi sampling at 40 Gs/s. as shown in . The START and STOP signals produced by the delay module were measured with the oscilloscope and the time difference at a fixed voltage threshold was computed. This calibration procedure allowed to compensate for known deviations from the ideal behavior of the delay module  as well as to know the systematic error introduced by the setup.

Simplified block diagram for the calibration of the test setup. The setup is the same as the one used for characterizing the test structure () but the test structure was replaced by an oscilloscope measuring the START and STOP signals.

The results of the calibration procedure prior to the characterization of the test setup are shown in . The measured delay follows a Gaussian distribution . In the two plots shown in we find the difference between the mean of this distribution and the set delay in the left and the standard deviation of this distribution in the right, as functions of the set delay. The quantity we are more interested in here is the fluctuation of the delay. This quantity seems to be on the order of 4-4.5 ps for the whole range of delays. This number contains both the systematic of the test setup and the one from the oscilloscope. To get an estimation of the contribution from the oscilloscope itself, a 50 Ω "T" splitter was used to connect a single output from the test setup in the two inputs of the oscilloscope and measure the time difference in the same way. During this measurement the settings in the oscilloscope were left unchanged. A value of 4.8 ps was obtained, showing that most of the fluctuations shown in (right plot) are coming from the oscilloscope. As a result I am forced to consider that the fluctuations in the time difference between the START and STOP signals is negligible throughout this work.

Characterization

For the characterization process the setup was assembled as in taking care of modifying as least as possible the configuration with respect to the calibration procedure in order to not introduce unwanted effectsThis setup was observed to change its calibration due to environment effects in the past . For this characterization the environment was kept almost untouched, for example the oscilloscope used for the calibration procedure was left untouched next to the setup even when unused during the measurements.. In pictures of the setup during the characterization are shown.

Pictures of the test setup. The oscilloscope used for the calibration procedure was left at all the time next to the setup, even when not used, to maintain the environment as close as possible to the calibration setup.

The characterization proceeded as follows:

1. A random time between 0 and 10 ns was chosen.
2. The delay module was configured to produce such a time difference between the START and STOP signals.
3. The START and STOP signals were produced thus running the TDC structure.
4. The SAFF and COUNT outputs of each of the four TDCs in the test structure were read.

In this plot we can explore the data in a very crude but intuitive way. For example, if we chose a single output and isolate its trace by double clicking in the legend we see that all the occurrences of such output are very constrained in time, as expected. We can also see that the distributions are not identical between one another, for example the distribution of 0|000000000000000000001 and 0|000000000000000000011 (the first two in the legend) has a different width. Some sequences, for example 0|00000000000111111111, show a very peculiar bimodal distribution. This effect is due to the existence of "forbidden times" in the test setup, for some reason some delay values cannot be generatedIt is not yet known with certainty what is th ereason for this, but it is probably a bad implementation of the algorithm that defines the configuration of the delay module given an arbitrary delay value.. This is evident if we focus on the trace with legend All events without filtering.

It can also be appreciated in that the three TDCs "run at the same speed" in the sense that the slope of the three lines cannot be distinguished from one another.

To further proceed with the analysis, a value of time resolution was assigned to each different output. Since the distribution of the sequences in time tends to be rather uniformSee for example the distribution of 0|000000000000000011111 in ., instead of using the standard deviation $\sigma$ as a measure for the time resolution, it was defined as the difference between the 95 % and the 5 % quantiles. This quantity is shown in . As can be seen, most of the values of time resolution accumulate below 50 ps and there are some isolated and periodic peaks with values close to 1 ns. These peaks correspond to the degenerated outputs mentioned previously; the same output is found when the counter commutes from $n-1$ to $n$ and when the counter commutes from $n$ to $n+1$, thus producing a distribution with two peaks separated by the counter period. As this problem is already understood, we can now focus in the region with time resolution below 60 ps. In the plot in a moving average for each TDC was added to ease the visualization. In these averages we see that for outputs between 0|xxxx and 16|xxxx there is a tendency to increase, and then there is a sudden decrease. The increase, which denotes a degradation in the time resolution, is expected because the fluctuations in the commutation time of the inverters.

To conclude with the analysis, the distribution of the time resolution from was plotted. The graph is shown in . The bins beyond 1 ns can be ignored as they correspond to the degenerated outputs. If we zoom in horizontally in the region below 80 ps we see that the worse time resolution is, for only a single output, 70 ps. The peak resolution is slightly below 20 ps and the mean time resolution around 30-40 ps.

Required space (surface)

In it is graphically shown the required space to implement the TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 and compared to a 50×50 µm² pixel. As can be seen, it does not fit.

Diagram comparing the size of a 50×50 µm² pixel with the area required for the current implementation of the TDC. As can be seen, this implementation does not fit in such a pixel.

Conclusions and discussion

The TDC V1 SW 28 10 19 test structure was characterized in terms of its performance in time measurements. Its working principle was understood and a specialized test setup was configured for the characterization. A careful calibration was done and checked on the test setup before the measurements to the TDC, and this calibration was revised again after the measurements were completed to verify the correct functioning of the system. During the characterization process a bug was found in the circuit implemented in the silicon, which affects the least significant bit of the counter. Despite this complication it was still possible to proceed with the characterization.

For this test structure the time resolution is better than 60 ps, with a typical value of around 30 ps. The range of time measured spans between 0 and 10 ns. The time resolution was observed to degrade as the measured time increases; however this degradation seems to be small, in the order of 10 % for the whole measured range.

It is still pending to determine the power consumption of this design. The current implementation does not fit in a 50×50 µm² pixel.