Delay line design for high-resolution time-to-digital converters
Microelectronic technology is constantly scaling towards more modern, advanced, smaller technology nodes, which allows higher operational speeds and more robustness to total ionising dose. However, the technology downscaling also lowers supply voltage, thus shrinking the available headroom for the voltage domain operations. That is why more and more attention is paid to the processing of the analog signal in the time domain, where zero crossings of a signal represent analog information. That is why time-to-digital converters (TDC) take the stage instead of analog-to-digital converters (ADC). Moreover, in order to withstand harsh environments to be able to operate in the field of high energy and nuclear physics and space, these devices have to be able to tolerate the ionising radiation effects, thus, radiation hardening is required to mitigate this degradation caused by these effects.
This thesis aims to thoroughly explore the fundamental architectures of TDC, and propose and compare more advanced system architectures for time-to-digital converters, which would allow to improve possible resolution and power consumption (which is the main bottleneck for space applications and battery-powered devices) in comparison to the existing designs.
Detailed analysis of the Lee-Kim and Maneatis delay cells is conducted, covering minimal achievable delay, power consumption, the effect of local mismatch on the performance, jitter and supply sensitivity, in two different technologies: UMC 180nm and TSMC 65nm. The performances of the cells have been compared and the best one was chosen for the design of the delay line for precise timing signal generation. The solution for delay cell enhancement to be suitable for specific architectures is given for enabling coarse-fine tuning.
The sub-gate delay resolution in the order of pico-seconds is discussed and is achieved by using local passive interpolation, feed-forwarding technique and their combination.
Additionally, the final design of a high-speed delay line is discussed, incorporating various improvements to ensure the correct operation of the delay line at high clock frequency in all process corners. The work concludes with a novel approach to mitigating supply sensitivity using active DAC control to amplify and counteract supply fluctuations, ensuring improved performance and reliability.
...
Keywords
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
- Pro gradu -tutkielmat [29740]
License
Related items
Showing items with similar title or keywords.
-
Design of a Negative Voltage Generator circuit in 180nm technology
Mahmood, Saad (2024)An on-chip Negative Voltage Generator block has been designed in 180nm silicon technology to produce a negative voltage rail for circuits that require biasing below ground. A switched capacitor circuit known as a charge ... -
Low-Power, Subthreshold Reference Circuits for the Space Environment : Evaluated with γ-rays, X-rays, Protons and Heavy Ions
Andreou, Charalambos M.; González-Castaño, Diego Miguel; Gerardin, Simone; Bagatin, Marta; Rodriguez, Faustino Gómez; Paccagnella, Alessandro; Prokofiev, Alexander V.; Javanainen, Arto; Virtanen, Ari; Liberali, Valentino; Calligaro, Cristiano; Nahmad, Daniel; Georgiou, Julius (MDPI AG, 2019)The radiation tolerance of subthreshold reference circuits for space microelectronics is presented. The assessment is supported by measured results of total ionization dose and single event transient radiation-induced ... -
Chaos and its Degradation-Promoting-Based Control in an Antithetic Integral Feedback Circuit
Zand, Armin M.; Tavazoei, Mohammad Saleh; Kuznetsov, Nikolay V. (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2022)This letter deals with a novel variant of antithetic integral feedback controller (AIFC) motifs which can feature robust perfect adaptation, a pervasive (desired) ability in natural (synthetic) biomolecular circuits, when ... -
Ionilähdelaitteiston kehitys säteilytystestausta varten
Kalvas, Taneli (2003) -
Design and simulation of efficient combinational circuits based on a new XOR structure in QCA technology
Safaiezadeh, Behrouz; Mahdipour, Ebrahim; Haghparast, Majid; Sayedsalehi, Samira; Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi (Springer, 2021)Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), due to its unique characteristics like low power consumption, nanoscale design, and high computing speed is considered as an emerging technology, and it can be used as an alternative ...