An Asynchronous Fixed Priority Arbiter for High througput Time Correlated Single Photon Counting Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a Fixed Priority Arbiter (FPA) which fully takes benefice of asynchronous design. It signs up in a Time Correlated Single Photon Counting system where the data transfer from the Time to Digital Converters to the readout or process unit is a critical aspect. In order to increase the photon counting rate of the setup, the device has to handle a large amount of data following the increasing number of sensors. Thanks to its asynchronous design, the proposed FPA can be easily assembled to build a wide data path tree to guide all the data to a single output. The implementation on a 180 nm CMOS technology shows that a 128 input wide path tree can achieve a burst input rate of 21 Giga event per second while sustaining an output data rate of 333 Mega event per second.