Calibration Methods for Time-to-Digital Converters

In this paper, two of the most common calibration methods of synchronous TDCs, which are the bin-by-bin calibration and the average-bin-width calibration, are first presented and compared. Then, an innovative new robust calibration method for asynchronous TDCs is proposed and evaluated. Simulation results showed that: (i) For a synchronous TDC, the bin-by-bin calibration, applied to a histogram, does not improve the TDC's differential non-linearity (DNL); nevertheless, it improves its Integral Non-Linearity (INL), whereas the average-bin-width calibration significantly improves both the DNL and the INL. (ii) For an asynchronous TDC, the DNL can be improved up to 10 times by applying the bin-by-bin calibration, whereas the proposed method is almost independent of the non-linearity of the TDC and can improve the DNL up to 100 times. The simulation results were confirmed by experiments carried out using real TDCs implemented on a Cyclone V SoC-FPGA. For an asynchronous TDC, the proposed calibration method is 10 times better than the bin-by-bin method in terms of the DNL improvement.