[time-nuts] Time tagging fpga

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Sun Nov 23 10:55:43 EST 2014


I was about to comment on this. As you interpolate among the 8 phases, 
time errors in the routing might need to compensated for in order to 
represent a "flat" stepping of time-compensation. It will not be perfect 
naturally.

Cheers,
Magnus

On 11/23/2014 03:57 PM, Anders Wallin wrote:
>>
>> Anders,
>> The counter runs on a Pipistrello.  I looked at the information on the web
>> about time taggers before starting.  I decided to try an oversampling
>> scheme described by a group of  Italian? physicists for a multichannel time
>> tagging instrument.  They used 4x oversampling.  My version is crude; it
>> uses the 50 MHz on-board clock but of course could use an external clock
>> source.  The clock is multiplied to 1 GHz and then divided into four 125 Hz
>> clocks phased 45 degrees apart.  There is a fifth 125 MHz clock at 0 phase
>> for the main counter and external interface.
>> There are four channels, each with 3 bits for value and a forth bit
>> indicating an event.  The sixteen bits are followed by a 48 bit counter
>> value.
>>
>
> what, if any, signal conditioning do you have between the DMTD output and
> the FPGA? I was thinking about copying the CERN DIO design which looks like
> this:
> http://ibin.co/1iEwLuAUQYJ4
> it has a fuse, a resistor to set the input impedance, protection diodes,
> and an ADCMP604 that outputs an LVDS pair to the FPGA.
>
> The CERN design is for a 125 MHz clock. What would be the preferred way to
> generate this for the Pipistrello, with an optional 10MHz reference input?
> OCXO at 10MHz and a ADF4351 PLL+VCO up to 125MHz? Does someone have a
> tested circuit that autodetects the external 10MHz and can switch between
> the OCXO and ext-ref?
>
>
>
>> This yields 1 ns resolution (bin size) but the bins sizes are certainly
>> not all equal.  I have few means to check the accuracy but for my purposes
>> (logging 100 Hz to 1 Hz zero crossings of a DMTD) it is certainly more
>> accurate than I need.  I have experimented with .5 ns bin sizes, also using
>> the 8x oversampling with a 250 MHz clock.  To keep the backend 125 MHz
>> structure I used a two phase multiplexer to combine two successive samples.
>> This runs but is not reliable and needs further work before it's useful.
>>
>
> Did you post the schematic for your DMTD?
> Many of the time-to-digital papers calibrate the bin-width by collecting
> time-stamps from an asynchronous pulse-source. If the bins are equal you
> should get a flat histogram. Some use a ring-oscillator on the fpga for
> generating the asynchronous hits.
>
>
> Anders
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