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

Florian Teply usenet at teply.info
Sat Sep 8 17:34:32 UTC 2012


Hi fellow time nuts,

quite soon I'll have to come up with a clever idea to characterize a
few chips of a 130nm BiCMOS technology for transients. Unfortunately,
I'll have to look at something on the order of five dozen outputs per
chip, all at the same time. 
If money and development time was no concern, I'd probably go with
roughly 250 Multi-GSample ADCs and sample all the outputs
simultaneously. Unfortunately, money is an issue (who would have
guessed? ;-P ), and I can't put several years into making this all
work. Not to speak of handling all the data generated...

The idea I have right now is employing something on the order of three
to five comparators per output, fed with different trigger levels. That
way I should be able to get some information on the transient shape as
well. But then I'll have to throw a few hundred Time Interval Counters
at the problem in order to get the information on the duration of the
transients.  So in general, amplitude  information comes from the
comparator trigger levels, time information from the TICs.

What I expect from the DUTs is transients in the range between 1 and
maybe 50 nanoseconds duration, but on some circuits they may be a lot
quicker as the bipolars are wicked fast (about 3-5 ps gate delay in
ECL inverters).

What do you guys think, would a truckload of TICs do the job? Maybe not
on the Bipolars, but at the plain CMOS this should do.

Any hints?

Best regards,
Florian



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