Design of a high-resolution Time-to-Digital converter chip

Time-to-Digital converter (TDC) is one of the high-precision time measurement techniques. The design of a TDC chip is presented in this paper. This TDC chip occupies a cyclic tapped delay line which forms a ring oscillator. Several measurement functions are supported, include Range1, Range2, self-calibration and temperature measurement. The TDC chip is implemented in 0.18µm 1P5M CMOS logic technology. Test results show the resolution of measurement is 52ps. The dynamic power current is 1.5348 mA, and static power current is 116.5706 µA at 25°C temperature and 3.3V I/O, 1.8V core voltage. The TDC can be used in different kind of measurement, such as distance, flow volume, speed, etc.