03/03/2023, 08:10 Radiation-hardened single-chip picosecond Time-to-Digital Converter ASIC | Nebula Public Library

Nebula Public Library

The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

MULTI-PROGRAMME SEARCH ADVANCED SEARCH TIMELINE HELP

Radiation-hardened single-chip picosecond Time-to-Digital Converter

ASIC
Thu, 10/20/2022 - 10:42

 Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn

Programme: Discovery Start Date: 2020

Programme Reference: ETD 2020-03-c End Date: 2022

Contractor: Magics Instruments Country: Belgium

Status: Closed

Description:
Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) are crucial elements in many sensor readout
systems, such as time-of-flight sensors, laser ranging devices, LiDAR, ultrasonic
sensors, particle detectors, etc. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no
rad-hard TDC component available on the market, which could meet the targeted
specification defined in this project. The goal of this project is prototyping and lab
testing of a radiation-hardened single-chip picosecond TDC in a commercial 65 nm
CMOS technology. The TDC will be able to measure time differences between a
start and stop signal and convert this to a digital value with an accuracy better than 10 picoseconds. It will support ‘single shot’ operation, which means it can carry out
the conversion with the proposed accuracy even from a single start and stop signal, without averaging or noise shaping. Innovation content of this project has focused
on the following aspects: 1. Current radiation tolerant TDCs are mostly based on radiation tolerant FPGAs with a resolution of around 100 ps and radiation tolerance up
to merely 10 kGy. FPGA based TDCs suffer from high power consumption, high implementation cost, large device size, and limited resolution. The TDC proposed in this
project will be implemented in a mainstream commercial 65 nm CMOS process, which offers highest integration level, lowest power consumption, and lower fabrication
cost for volume production. 2. For this circuit, a Total Ionizing Dose (TID) tolerance of 100 kGy, and a SEE tolerance up to a Linear Energy Transfer (LET) of 100
MeV/mg.cm2 is targeted. These requirements are in line with the most extreme environments encountered in space. 3. It has been shown that ionizing radiation causes
changes in transistor parameters, increases 1/f noise and worsens mismatch problems. Especially the latter two effects have a huge impact on the accuracy of TDCs. In
this project, innovations will be proposed to achieve sub-10 ps performance in the presence of TID and SEE.

Application Domain: Generic Technologies

Competence Domain: 3-Avionic Systems

Executive summary: C4000132900_ExecutiveSummary.pdf

TDE GSTP NEBULA

MULTI-PROGRAMME SEARCH ADVANCED SEARCH TIMELINE HELP

Privacy Notice Cookie Notice

https://nebula.esa.int/content/radiation-hardened-single-chip-picosecond-time-digital-converter-asic 1/1