Multi-channel high-linearity time-to-digital converters in 20 nm and 28 nm FPGAs for LiDAR applications

Xie, Wujun and Chen, Haochang and Zang, Zhenya and Li, David Day-Uei; (2020) Multi-channel high-linearity time-to-digital converters in 20 nm and 28 nm FPGAs for LiDAR applications. In: 2020 6th International Conference on Event-Based Control, Communication, and Signal Processing (EBCCSP). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ. ISBN 9781728195810 (https://doi.org/10.1109/EBCCSP51266.2020.9291360)

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new calibration method, the mixed-binning method, to pursue a TDC with high linearity in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This method can reduce the nonlinearity caused by large clock skews in FPGAs efficiently. Therefore, a wide dynamic range tapped delay line (TDL) TDC has been developed with maintained linearity. We evaluated this method in Xilinx 20nm UltraScale FPGAs and Xilinx 28nm Virtex-7 FPGAs. Results conduct that this method is perfectly suitable for driverless vehicle applications which require high linearity with an acceptable resolution. The proposed method also has great potentials for multi-channel applications, due to the low logic resource consumption. For a quick proof-of-concept demonstration, an 8-channel solution has also been implemented. It can be further extended to a 64-channel version soon.

ORCID iDs

Xie, Wujun ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0483-8639, Chen, Haochang ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6196-4418, Zang, Zhenya and Li, David Day-Uei ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6401-4263;
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