Impact of Radiation-Induced Single-Event Transients on High Resolution Time to Digital Converter

Abstract

The paper presents the analysis of radiationinduced Single-Event Transients (SET) in Delay-Locked Loop (DLL) and its impact in the digital output of Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC). The performance of the TDC such as Differential Non-Linearity (DNL),Integral Non- Linearity (INL), resolution etc. are degraded due propagation of the SET from the DLL. The use of improved pseudo differential currentstarved delay cell structure in the Voltage Controlled Delay Line (VCDL) in DLL reduces the impact of radiation- induced SET in DLL, and enhances the robustness of DLL based TDC. This effort represents the first of its kind SET analysis on a DLL based TDC. The proposed DLL based TDC is designed in the AMS 180 nm CMOS technology and simulations show that the number of missing pulses on a SET strike in the modified pseudo differential delay cell is reduced to 50% than compared the conventional architectures