A high-resolution and one-cycle conversion time-to-digital converter architecture for PET image applications

In this paper, a high-resolution and one-cycle conversion time-to-digital converter (TDC) architecture with cell-based design for positron emission tomography (PET) applications is presented. The proposed TDC employs a cascade-stage structure to achieve high timing resolution and wide sampling range at the same time. Besides, based on the proposed two-level conversion structure, the proposed TDC not only can achieve single cycle latency and high speed of operation, but also have low circuit complexity as compared with conventional approaches. Simulation results show that operation frequency of the proposed TDC can be improved to 200 MHz with 50 ps resolution. In addition, the proposed TDC can be implemented with standard cells, making it easily portable to different processes and very suitable for biomedical chip applications.