Gated Ring Oscillator-Based Time-to-Digital Converter for Event-Triggered Sensing Applications
(2025) 2025 23rd IEEE Interregional NEWCAS Conference (NEWCAS) — Location: Paris, France (22.June.2025)
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- The requirements for high-performance and lowpower sensing applications have recently pushed for utilizing time-based approaches. Indeed, time-based circuits, such as time-to-digital converters (TDCs), benefit from technology scaling and improved time resolution with their highly digital nature. For instance, ring-oscillator (RO) based TDCs have received significant interest in embedded sensing applications due to their simplicity of operation and low time resolution. However, current RO-based topologies are not always suited for eventtriggered operations because they consume high power in freerunning mode, or suffer from several implementation challenges in gated mode due to charge sharing, leakage or sampling errors. To tackle these challenges, this work proposes an event-based GRO TDC, to target low-power sensing and radar applications. The proposed GRO TDC's differential topology and gating mechanisms maintain the performance and significantly reduce power consumption, enabling efficient event-based operations with negligible charge and sampling errors. The TDC is implemented in 65−nm technology, occupying 100μm×147μm. The oscillator's differential and integral non-linearity errors are kept below 0.17 LSB. An SNDR of 53.9 dB at 50 kHz is achieved with a 115 ps raw time resolution. The power dissipation is proportional to the operation frequency, with for instance 45.82μW at 1 MHz.
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Mohey, A. M., Kosunen, M., Ryynänen, J., & Andraud, M. (2025). Gated Ring Oscillator-Based Time-to-Digital Converter for Event-Triggered Sensing Applications. Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE Interregional NEWCAS Conference (NEWCAS). Published. 2025 23rd IEEE Interregional NEWCAS Conference (NEWCAS), Paris, France. https://doi.org/10.1109/newcas64648.2025.11107057