Abstract: A high resolution and fast conversion rate time-to-digital converter (TDC) design based on time amplifier (TA) is proposed. The pulse-train TA employs a two-step scheme. The input time interval is first amplified by a N-times TA and the effective time is extracted in pulse-train using a time-register. Then the resulted interval is further amplified by the other pulse-train amplifier to obtain the final result. The two-step TA can thus achieve large gain that is critical for high resolution TDC. Simulation results in 1.2 V, 65 nm technology showed that for a 10 bit TDC, a resolution of 0.8 ps and a conversion rate of 150 MS/s are achieved while consuming 2.1 mW power consumption.

Key words: time-to-digital converter , time amplifier , two-step architecture, time register