title: Note: All-digital CMOS MOS-capacitor-based pulse-shrinking mechanism suitable for time-to-digital converters.
abstract: This paper presents an all-digital CMOS pulse-shrinking mechanism suitable for time-to-digital converters (TDCs). A simple MOS capacitor is used as a pulse-shrinking cell to perform time attenuation for time resolving. Compared with a previous pulse-shrinking mechanism, the proposed mechanism provides an appreciably improved temporal resolution with high linearity. Furthermore, the use of a binary-weighted pulse-shrinking unit with scaled MOS capacitors is proposed for achieving a programmable resolution. A TDC involving the proposed mechanism was fabricated using a TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 0.18-μm CMOS process, and it has a small area of nearly 0.02 mm(2) and an integral nonlinearity error of ±0.8 LSB for a resolution of 24 ps.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung City 81146, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chun-Chi
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Yunlin County 64002, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chorng-Sii
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Hwang
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung City 81146, Taiwan.
authors.forename: You-Ting
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung City 81146, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Keng-Chih
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Liu