A Robust Time-to-Digital Converter Design with High Precision for Underwater Vehicle System Clock Synchronization and Sensing

This paper presents a robust time-to-digital converter (TDC) design insensitive to the hostile environment in underwater vehicles. Particularly, the proposed TDC is insensitive to process, voltage of supply, and temperature (PVT) variations existing in the noisy and unstable environment such that it is very critical to the synchronization of clocks among different electronic modules. Without a robust synchronized clock, the integrity of digital signals over the wireline for data communication and information exchange will be in danger. The proposed design is proved to attain the lowest power dissipation, <0.7 mW, and the least INL/DNL, < 0.5 LSB, even in the worst case according to all-corner simulation results.