The Analysis of Time Delays Stability in an FPGA-based Wave-Union Time-to-Digital Converter Core
The 12th IEEE Workshop on Advances in Information, Electronic and Electrical Engineering AIEEE’2025 2025
Jakovs Ratners, Artūrs Āboltiņš, Jacek Goczkowski, Marek Wojcikowski

Wave-union-based Time-to-Digital converters are one of the few emerging technologies that allow event time tagging in the range of a few picoseconds and below. So far, the most effort in implementing such a technology has been done using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) due to their logic reconfigurability and cost efficiency. The main component of a wave-union time-to-digital converter (TDC) is a tapped delay line (TDL) which consists of logic elements that act as fixed delays. Due to high dependency of FPGA on such factors as process-voltage-temperature (PVT) changes, clock-network jitter and device-to-device discrepancies, the behavior of delays of the logic elements over a course of measurements offer some degree of nonlinearity.This work focuses on the time delays quantization stability and effects of nonlinear delay distribution for a wave-union core developed for a Microchip’s IGLOO2, a general-purpose field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It is demonstrated that while controlling core voltage supply and external factors such as electro-static discharge (ESD) and temperature to be at a constant low level, the nonlinearity was still present in the processed data in the form of large random spikes, but the instability of estimated bin delays has decreased.


Keywords
Time-to-digital conversion, FPGA
DOI
10.1109/AIEEE66149.2025.11050763
Hyperlink
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11050763

Ratners, J., Āboltiņš, A., Goczkowski, J., Wojcikowski, M. The Analysis of Time Delays Stability in an FPGA-based Wave-Union Time-to-Digital Converter Core. In: The 12th IEEE Workshop on Advances in Information, Electronic and Electrical Engineering AIEEE’2025, Lithuania, Vilnius, 15-17 May, 2025. Vilnius: IEEE, 2025, pp.1-4. ISBN 978-1-6654-6562-5. e-ISBN 978-1-6654-9688-9. ISSN 2689-7334. e-ISSN 2689-7342. Available from: doi:10.1109/AIEEE66149.2025.11050763

Publication language
English (en)
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