A time-to-digital converter with gated enable function

Abstract

The invention relates to a time-to-digital converter with a gating enabling function. The time-to-digital converter comprises a ring oscillator circuit, a low-order coding circuit, a high-order counter circuit, a gating signal generating circuit, a monostable pulse generating circuit, a register array circuit and a serial data output circuit. The time-to-digital converter with the gating enablingfunction is adopted as the core of a high-precision time measuring technology, and is widely applied to the fields laser ranging, biological medical treatment, topographic mapping, aerospace and the like. In recent years, the unmanned driving technology is developed rapidly, and laser radar is the key technology applied to the unmanned driving technology. The time-to-digital converter can be applied to the laser radar technology, and serve as a time-to-digital conversion circuit in a large-scale SPAD pixel array, and high-precision wide-range measurement of the time interval is achieved.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention belongs to the technical field of digital-analog hybrid integrated circuits, and in particular relates to a time-to-digital converter with a gate enable function. Background technique [0002] The time-to-digital converter is mainly used to measure the time interval, convert the input analog time interval signal into an output digital signal, and then realize the digitization of the time interval. [0003] In recent years, the Time of Flight (TOF) ranging method has important applications in military and civilian fields such as 3D imaging, unmanned driving, biomedicine, terrain mapping, and aerospace. In the TOF ranging method, a time-digital converter (Time-Digital Converter, TDC for short) circuit is mainly used to complete the quantitative conversion of the time interval signal. Since the advanced level of these technical fields is closely related to the accuracy of time interval measurement, the requirements for the measurement dynam...

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Problems solved by technology

[0004] At present, traditional time-to-digital converters are mainly one-stage and two-stage structures; among them, the resolution of the counter structure and delay chain structure in the one-stage TDC is limited by the minimum delay of the delay unit in its own structure, It cannot meet the high-precision requirements; the two-stage TDC is divided into two stages of coarse quantization and fine quantization to improve the time measurement accuracy and measurement dynamic range, but the occupied area and power consumption of its structure will increase with the increase of the input dynamic range However, the increase does not conform to the development trend of low voltage and low power consumption of integrated circuits

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