A General Method of Generating Code Density Calibration Signal for Time-to-Digital Converter and Its Realization

This paper proposes a universal Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) code density calibration signal generation method, which is based on the theory of coherent sampling. By reasonably setting the frequency difference between the TDC master clock and the calibration signal, combining with the output hold circuit, a random signal for calibration is generated to ensure that the random signal is evenly distributed on the TDC delay path to achieve Bin-by-bin calibration of TDC. The paper implements a carry chain plain TDC based on XILINX’s 28 nm Kintex-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The method is used to calibrate the code width (tap delay time) of plain TDC, and the performance parameters of TDC in 2-tap mode are studied and calibrated. The time resolution (corresponding to the least significant bit of TDC, Least Significant Bit, LSB) is 24.9 ps, with the differential nonlinearity is (–0.84～3.1) LSB, and the integral nonlinearity is (–5.0～2.2) LSB. The calibration method described in the paper is implemented using clock logic resources, and multiple tests show that the standard deviation of a single delay unit is better than 0.5 ps. This calibration method uses clock logic resources instead of combinatorial logic resources to realize high-precision automatic calibration of plain TDC, with good repeatability and stability. This method is also suitable for other types of TDC code density calibration.