Title :
Development of a High Resolution TDC for Implementation in Flash-Based and Anti-Fuse FPGAs for Aerospace Application
Author :
Xi Qin ; Changqing Feng ; Deliang Zhang ; Bin Miao ; Lei Zhao ; Xinjun Hao ; Shubin Liu ; Qi An
Author_Institution :
State Key Lab. of Particle Detection & Electron., Univ. of Sci. & Technol. of China, Hefei, China
Abstract :
A high precision, low dead time, large dynamic range time-to-digital (TDC) architecture, suited to be implemented in Actel flash-based and anti-fuse FPGAs, is presented in this paper. A prototype board has been designed with such a TDC implemented in three different industrial grade FPGAs: an anti-fuse FPGA AX500, flash-based FPGAs APA600 and A3PE1500. Test results showed that a time resolution of 225 ps RMS with a 758 ps averaged bin size was obtained for APA600, while 127 ps RMS with 427 ps bin size for A3PE1500. For a TDC in AX500, a RMS of 37 ps with 75 ps bin size was obtained. Thermal tests suggested that the prototype TDCs operate well in a temperature range from -21°C to +71°C with a constant performance after applying a compensation mechanism utilizing the linear relation between TDC bin sizes and ambient temperature. The TDC structure can be directly migrated into space-qualified FPGAs and applied in space experiments.
Keywords :
avionics; field programmable gate arrays; mean square error methods; time-digital conversion; RMS; TDC architecture; TDC structure; aerospace application; ambient temperature; antifuse FPGA AX500; compensation mechanism; flash-based FPGA APA600; flash-based FPGAA3PE1500; high resolution TDC; industrial grade FPGA; space experiments; space-qualified FPGA; temperature -21 C to 71 C; temperature range; thermal tests; time-to-digital architecture; Clocks; Delays; Field programmable gate arrays; Prototypes; Temperature dependence; Temperature distribution; Anti-fuse FPGA; delay element; flash-based FPGA; time measurement; time-to-digital convertor;
Journal_Title :
Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TNS.2013.2280919
