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Project

Radiation tolerant sub-picosecond single-shot time-to-digital conversion

Ionizing radiation has a huge impact on electronic chips. It degrades their performance and higher
doses often cause irreparable damage. Scaled IC technologies allow high processing speeds and
have shown potential for radiation tolerance. Nevertheless, for instrumentation and
communication, a large amount of analog signal processing is required, which strongly degrades
under radiation. In scaled technologies it has become interesting to process signals in the time
domain, where analog information is stored in the zero transitions of a rectangular signal. The
Analog-to-Digital Converter can be replaced by a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC). This project
targets a pioneering TDC with sub-picosecond resolution and a radiation tolerance up to 10 MGy,
1000 times higher than available today. This will pave the way for highly radiation tolerant systems
in ITER, HL-LHC and other harsh radiation environments.

Date:11 Jul 2016 →  8 Feb 2023
Keywords:RadHard, TDC's, ASIC
Disciplines:Nanotechnology, Design theories and methods
Project type:PhD project