[time-nuts] Multiple Time Interval Counters to measure Transients?

Marek Peca marek at duch.cz
Mon Sep 10 19:53:06 UTC 2012


Hello,

just few quick comments:

> Unfortunately, I don't have a more precise technical spec. I'm just
> trying to find a viable solution to characterize a chip manufacturing
> process with regard to Single-Event Transients. As this is supposed
> to only be a side task for my PhD, I would prefer to use something that
> already exists. On the other hand, until now I have no own budget, so
> if I have to ask for money to buy stuff, it would better be something
> that can be used for oher purposes as well.

Agreed. Fortunately, TDCs are usually made to be flexible enough, unless 
they are tailored to a specific need of your application. What seemed to 
me at the beginning of your requests.

> What I had in mind here was the tradeoff between the flexibility of an
> FPGA and the performance of a dedicated ASIC. Of course, this very much
> depends on which optimizations were done and which technology is
> targeted. (..)

In general, it's true. However, last year we have got results quite 
comparable to ACAM's ASIC within relatively slow FPGA. We need to perform 
more temperature-stability and aging tests to confirm the results.

> Depends on what you refer to by "testing". I'll be definitely the wrong
> guy to ask for elaborated jitter measurements, especially in the
> single-digit picosecond range. But if testing means giving your stuff a
> shot to see if it fits my needs, I'm all in.

The second option. I will let you know after assembling our eval boards. 
They are 2-channel only.

Regards,
Marek




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