Successive Approximation Time-to-Digital Converters

The successive approximation scheme belongs to fundamental and most successful methods of analog-to-digital conversion that has been implemented commercially for decades and is still used nowadays. Despite of a widespread use of successive approximation ADCs, the binary search scheme in time-to-digital converters (SA-TDCs) is adopted much rarely. The paper provides an overview and comparison of conversion algorithms for SA-TDCs including the monotone, decision-select, and continuous disassembly successive approximations. The architectures, designs, implementations and performance of SA-TDCs including time resolution, conversion range, conversion time, power consumption, and converter nonlinearities are also discussed.