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Jitter characteristics of an on-chip voltage reference-locked time-to-digital converter

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Abstract

The noise and jitter characteristics of an on-chip voltage reference-locked ring oscillator used in the time-to-digital converter (TDC) of the integrated receiver of a pulsed time-of-flight laser rangefinder are presented. The frequency of the ring oscillator, 683 MHz, was locked to the on-chip voltage reference by means of a frequency-to-voltage converter, resulting in better than 90 ppm/°C stability. The noise and jitter transfer characteristics of the loop were derived, and simulations were performed to see the effects of different noise types (white and 1/f noise) on the cumulative jitter of the locked ring oscillator. Finally, these results were verified by jitter measurements performed using an integrated time-to-digital converter (TDC) fabricated on the same die (0.18 μm CMOS process). The cumulative jitter of the on-chip reference-locked ring oscillator was less than 30 ps (sigma value) over a time range of 70 ns, which made it possible to use this oscillator as the heart of a TDC when aiming at centimetre-level precision (1 cm = 67 ps) in laser ranging.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported financially by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES), the Academy of Finland and certain industrial companies, all of which are gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Electronics Laboratory, University of Oulu, P.O.Box 4500, 90014, Oulu, Finland

    Ilkka Nissinen & Juha Kostamovaara

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  1. Ilkka Nissinen
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Correspondence to Ilkka Nissinen.

Appendix

Appendix

Derivation of the closed-loop noise transfer of the voltage reference-locked ring oscillator.

In order to evaluate the phase noise of the voltage reference-locked ring oscillator with noiseless reference voltage, some noise (ωnoise(s)) has to be added to the point ωosc in Fig. 5 and closed-loop transfer function from that point back to the same point has to be derived. Because of the negative feedback the closed-loop noise transfer function (H no(s)) can be expressed as

$$ H_{\text{no}} (s) = {\frac{1}{{1 + {\frac{{A \cdot H(s) \cdot K_{o} \cdot K_{f} }}{M}}}}}. $$
(A1)

As the transfer function of the operational amplifier (H(s) = 1/((s/ω p ) + 1)) can be assumed to be a low-pass, single-pole system, (A1) can be derived as

$$ H_{\text{no}} (s) = {\frac{{{\tfrac{M}{{\omega_{p} \cdot \left( {M + K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A} \right)}}}s + {\tfrac{M}{{M + K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A}}}}}{{{\tfrac{M}{{\omega_{p} \cdot \left( {M + K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A} \right)}}}s + 1}}}. $$
(A2)

Because AK o K f  ≫ M, the closed-loop noise transfer function can be expressed as

$$ H_{\text{no}} (s) = {\frac{{{\tfrac{M \cdot s}{{K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A \cdot \omega_{p} }}} + {\tfrac{M}{{K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A}}}}}{{{\tfrac{M \cdot s}{{K_{o} \cdot K_{f} \cdot A \cdot \omega_{p} }}} + 1}}}. $$
(A3)

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Nissinen, I., Kostamovaara, J. Jitter characteristics of an on-chip voltage reference-locked time-to-digital converter. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 64, 271–280 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-010-9456-x

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