[time-nuts] Time interval interpolation by sampling a pair of sinewaves in quadrature.

Dr Bruce Griffiths bruce.griffiths at xtra.co.nz
Tue Sep 26 07:42:51 EDT 2006


Yet another high resolution time interval interpolation technique is to 
sample a pair of quadrature sinewaves at the leading edge of the pulse 
to be time stamped.
When sampling a pair of 10MHz sinewaves in quadrature with a 12 bit ADC 
a timing resolution of better than 50 picosec is possible.
With a pair of 1MHz sinewaves in quadrature a timing resolution of 
better than 500 picosec is possible.

The only difficulty is in deciding which cycle was sampled.
Either a sequence of progessively lower frequency quadrature sinewave 
pairs can be sampled, or the output of synchroniser can be used to 
sample both the quadrature sinewave pair and a counter clocked at the 
synchroniser frequency. The worst case synchroniser delay must be less 
than the sinewave period.

The phase relationship between the synchroniser (and counter) clock and 
the quadrature sinewave pair need not have any particular value nor have 
a low temperature coefficient.

A 3 or 4 stage synchroniser clocked at 10MHz has a worst case delay of 
about 500 ns which is adequate for a 1MHz quadrature sinewave pair.
The sinewaves can be generated by dividing the 10MHz by 10 using a low 
phase noise divider such as a 74AC161/3 followed by a low pass filter.
A 90 degree phase shift can be produced by a 250ns delay line. Other 
techniques can also be used to generate the required phase shift.
A single sinewave can be used if a pair of samples are taken 1/ 4 period 
apart.

A microprocessor is used to calculate the phase angle at the sampling 
instant from the pair of quadrature samples and combine this with the 
sampled count to produce a high resolution time stamp.

The prevalence of pipelined high frequency ADCs with which it is 
difficult (but not impossible) to take a single sample makes it 
difficult to apply this technique to sample high frequency sinewaves.
However if one uses a gated delay line timed oscillator to generate the 
sampling clock it is possible to isolate the required sample pair with 
some additional logic.

With a 1MHz sinewave suitable ADCs are readily available.

The harmonic content of the reference sinewaves must be low.
This is easily achieved by filtering.
Quadrature phasing errors can easily be calibrated and corrected in 
software.
Minor variations in the reference sinewave amplitude have little effect, 
although the quadrature pair should have the same amplitude.
sampling a single sinewave 1/4 cycle apart eliminates the requirement 
for equal amplitude sinewaves.

Bruce



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