A field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) based time-to-digital-converter (TDC), which combines different types of delay chains in a single time measurement channel, is reported in this paper. A new TDC architecture is developed, and both a carry-chain and the DSP48E1 adders, which are integrated inside the FPGA chip, are employed to achieve high resolution time tagging. A single channel TDC has a 3.3 ps averaged bin size, a 5.4 ps single-shot precision, and a maximum sampling rate of 250 MSa/s. The differential-non-linearity of the single TDC channel is −3.3 ps/+24.1 ps, and the integral-non-linearity is within −10.4 ps/+68.6 ps. The TDC performance can be improved by using four TDC channels to measure one input signal, and a 3.4 ps single-shot precision can be obtained. Due to the implementation of the delicated TDC structure, only a small amount of digital resources is required to achieve the picosecond time measurement resolution. Therefore, the reported TDC architecture is suitable for multi-channel applications that require high time resolution measurements of multiple input signals.

A high performance fast-Fourier-transform (FFT) spectrum analyzer, which is developed for measure spin noise spectrums, is presented in this paper. The analyzer is implemented with a field-programmable-gate-arrays (FPGA) chip for data and command management. An analog-to-digital-convertor chip is integrated for analog signal acquisition. In order to meet the various requirements of measuring different types of spin noise spectrums, multiple operating modes are designed and realized using the reprogrammable FPGA logic resources. The FFT function is fully managed by the programmable resource inside the FPGA chip. A 1 GSa/s sampling rate and a 100 percent data coverage ratio with non-dead-time are obtained. 30534 FFT spectrums can be acquired per second, and the spectrums can be on-board accumulated and averaged. Digital filters, multi-stage reconfigurable data reconstruction modules, and frequency down conversion modules are also implemented in the FPGA to provide flexible real-time data processing capacity, thus the noise floor and signals aliasing can be suppressed effectively. An efficiency comparison between the FPGA-based FFT spectrum analyzer and the software-based FFT is demonstrated, and the high performance FFT spectrum analyzer has a significant advantage in obtaining high resolution spin noise spectrums with enhanced efficiency.

No abstract