A novel charge-pump based Time-to-Digital Converter

摘要

In this work, the design of a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) for measuring the time-of-flight (ToF) of a radio pulse is described. It consists on two blocks: a time-to-voltage transducer, whose scheme is that of a charge pump, designed using a 0.25 mum CMOS process, and an incremental first order sigma-delta (SigmaDelta) converter. The two blocks are connected together by means of a sample and hold amplifier (SHA). The specifications are: time resolution smaller than 27 ps and range up to 220 ns. The total relative percentage error is less than 3%, if a more than 10 bits SigmaDelta converter is adopted.