Tradeoffs in Time-to-Digital Converter Architectures for Harsh Radiation Environments

Performance degradation of standard time-to-digital converters (TDCs) is inevitable due to the effects of ionizing radiation. In this article, the tradeoffs of different mitigation techniques for TDC architectures are presented. As the effect of radiation is challenging for such high-performance circuits in the state-of-the-art technologies, architectures that can compensate for radiation effects have become a necessity for TDCs to operate in these harsh radiation environments. By looking into the functionality of different architectures focusing on improving radiation tolerance, the main weak and strong points of different TDC architectures, including the compensation circuitry, are described. Possible solutions to those weak points are presented.