Design and Implementation of Two-Stage Time-to-Digital Converter Based on Rapid Single-Flux-Quantum Circuits

This work proposed a new time-to-digital converter (TDC) utilizing rapid single-flux-quantum circuits. The proposed TDC architecture comprises a counter and a ring oscillator to construct a coarse TDC and a vernier delay line to build a fine TDC, which would maintain the high resolution and high dynamic range of the whole TDC. A TDC with the proposed architecture has been designed, fabricated, and successfully tested. The measurement shows that the designed TDC works correctly with a 5.5 ps resolution, a 1320 ps dynamic range, and a 1.5 LSB differential nonlinearity.