An 11 b 7 ps Resolution Two-Step Time-to-Digital Converter With 3-D Vernier Space

This paper presents a fine-resolution time-to-digital converter (TDC) with a large dynamic range using a 3-D Vernier space. Despite the wide dynamic range, the required delay cells in the delay-lines are minimized, leading to better power efficiency. The proposed TDC also exploits the redundancy and error-correction technique to solve the offset error of coarse conversion in the 3-D Vernier space architecture. The TDC is implemented using a 0.13-mu m CMOS process. The measurement result shows a dynamic range with an 11-bit 6.98-ps resolution, an integrated nonlinearity of +/- 1.5 LSB, a power consumption of 328.8 mu W, and a die area of 0.28 mm(2).