Time-to-Digital Converters

There are numerous uses for measuring time intervals with picosecond resolution; LIDAR is undoubtedly the most well-known. However, other fields that also use picoseconds include tomography, communication, spectroscopy, and magnetrostrictive position sensing. The perfect framework for these systems is provided by ScioSense’s Time-to-Digital Converters, or TDCs for short.

The buffer delay durations serve as the foundation for the all-digital integrated circuits, which can be produced with conventional CMOS process technologies. High stability and repeatability are ensured using compensation methods for variations in voltage and temperature. The key benefits of digital TDCs over analog methods of measurement are their high measurement rates, low power dissipation, and excellent pulse-pair resolution.

ScioSense TDC products offer resolution as high as 10ps for a single shot, and some devices can achieve sampling rates as high as 35 Msamples/channel.

For LIDAR range-finding and medical imaging applications, these TDCs are ideal since they provide multiple channel outputs and multi-hit measurement capability down to 5 ns.

Application Diagram