128-channel high-linearity resolution- adjustable time-to-digital converters for LiDAR applications : software predictions and hardware implementations

Xie, Wujun and Wang, Yu and Chen, Haochang and Li, David Day-Uei (2022) 128-channel high-linearity resolution- adjustable time-to-digital converters for LiDAR applications : software predictions and hardware implementations. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 69 (4). 4264 - 4274. ISSN 0278-0046 (https://doi.org/10.1109/TIE.2021.3076708)

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new calibration method, called the mixed-binning (MB) method, to pursue high-linearity time-to-digital converters (TDCs) for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) applications. The proposed TDCs were developed using tapped delay-line (TDL) cells in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). With the MB method, we implemented a resolution-adjustable TDC showing excellent linearity in Xilinx UltraScale FPGAs. We demonstrate a 128-channel TDC to show that the proposed method is cost-effective in logic resources. We also developed a software tool to predict the performances of TDL-based TDCs robustly. Results from both software analysis and hardware implementations are in a good agreement and show that the proposed design has great potential for multichannel applications; the averaged DNL_(pk-pk) and INL_(pk-pk) are close to or even less than 0.05 LSB in multichannel designs.

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