Development of Multichannel Digital Pulse Processingg Platform for recording time of arrival

Abstract

Applications to measure accurate time intervals of sub-nano second resolution become popular as sensor and detector technology develops rapidly in the field such as nuclear physics, bio-medical nuclear medicine diagnosis (PET, gamma cameras), time-of-flight measurement and range finding area. As a result, a demand is increasing for digital pulse-processing platform that simultaneously records time of arrival, or time-to-digital converter (TDC), with single-shot accuracy from multiple channels. In this thesis, a multichannel, high timing resolution time-to-digital converter with single-shot accuracy is presented. For low-cost system and flexible reconfiguration, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used, and adjustable phase shifted clock scheme is proposed to ensure single-shot accuracy while holding ability to implement multiple channels, which is one of benefits of the phase shifted clock scheme. A TDC system is built based on the proposed architecture. Testing and characterization was done on the system to evaluate the performance of timing accuracy, single-shot capability, timing jitter, Differential Non-Linearity (DNL), Allan deviation (Time base stability) and system throughput.