Time to Digital Converters
Time to Digital Converters for Time Measurements
Cronologic GmbH & Co. KG is a supplier of board level time measurement solutions. The focus of these time to digital converter (or TDC) products is on high throughput multi channel and multi hit measurements while preserving very good resolutions in the low picoseconds range. Both PCI and PCIe bus protocols and form factors are supported.
Times to digital converter boards are used to measure the timing of incoming signals with picoseconds resolution. Examples for industrial and medical applications are LIDAR, RADAR and mass spectrometers. In fundamental research TDCs are used in atom physics and single photon counting.
A specialty of cronologic is its continuous time stamping approach. Conventional TDCs report the time relative to a common reference signal. Often only signals arriving earlier than the reference (common stop) or later then the reference (common start) are measured. Cronologics board however; produce an infinite stream of sorted time stamps from all channels. Software can easily simulate both common modes and in addition all kinds of other configurations are possible. For example the boards can be used as time stamping frequency counters.
The HPTDC8-PCI is a PCI based pure time stamping TDC with 21 channels. 8 of these channels have a single shot resolution of 25ps. These inputs support the NIM signaling standard.
The Ndigo5G-10 is a general purpose ADC digitizer sampling with 10 bit vertical resolution and up to 5 Gsps sampling rate. It has a PCIe 4x formfactor with 800MByte/s throughput.
The firmware is optimized for time measurement applications: Incoming pulses are detected and extracted from the data stream. Only the pulse and a configurable number of samples before and after the pulse are written to the DMA buffer. This greatly reduces the CPU load for analyzing the data.
The high sampling rate and resolution allows very high resolutions down to 5ps with no dead time between pulses.
In contrast to a pure TDC the digitizer approach allows to optionally connect the detector output directly without a discriminator to get amplitude and pulse shape information in addition to the time stamp. This makes this board perfect for use in mass spectrometers and airborn LIDAR systems.
For more information please visit: Time to Digital Converter
Times to digital converter boards are used to measure the timing of incoming signals with picoseconds resolution. Examples for industrial and medical applications are LIDAR, RADAR and mass spectrometers. In fundamental research TDCs are used in atom physics and single photon counting.
A specialty of cronologic is its continuous time stamping approach. Conventional TDCs report the time relative to a common reference signal. Often only signals arriving earlier than the reference (common stop) or later then the reference (common start) are measured. Cronologics board however; produce an infinite stream of sorted time stamps from all channels. Software can easily simulate both common modes and in addition all kinds of other configurations are possible. For example the boards can be used as time stamping frequency counters.
The HPTDC8-PCI is a PCI based pure time stamping TDC with 21 channels. 8 of these channels have a single shot resolution of 25ps. These inputs support the NIM signaling standard.
The Ndigo5G-10 is a general purpose ADC digitizer sampling with 10 bit vertical resolution and up to 5 Gsps sampling rate. It has a PCIe 4x formfactor with 800MByte/s throughput.
The firmware is optimized for time measurement applications: Incoming pulses are detected and extracted from the data stream. Only the pulse and a configurable number of samples before and after the pulse are written to the DMA buffer. This greatly reduces the CPU load for analyzing the data.
The high sampling rate and resolution allows very high resolutions down to 5ps with no dead time between pulses.
In contrast to a pure TDC the digitizer approach allows to optionally connect the detector output directly without a discriminator to get amplitude and pulse shape information in addition to the time stamp. This makes this board perfect for use in mass spectrometers and airborn LIDAR systems.
For more information please visit: Time to Digital Converter