Pulsed light time-of-flight measurement based on a differential hysteresis timing discrimination method

In the pulsed light time-of-flight (ToF) measurement, the timing point generated in the receiver channel is very important to the measurement accuracy. Therefore, a differential hysteresis timing discrimination method is proposed to generate timing points of the receiver channel. This method is based on utilizing the unbalanced characteristics of the fully differential operational amplifier circuit as well as introducing extra hysteresis levels to achieve the stable generation of timing points. With this method, fewer circuit components are consumed and the dynamic range of the receiver channel is not limited by its linear range. The experiments demonstrate that a receiver channel applying the proposed discrimination reaches better single shot accuracy compared to that using leading-edge timing discrimination. This method is also suitable for the timing walk error compensation by means of pulse width. Finally, these results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in pulsed light ToF measurement.