[time-nuts] Linear Interpolator

Stephan Sandenbergh stephan at rrsg.ee.uct.ac.za
Fri Jun 30 08:02:11 EDT 2006


Hi Ulrich,

Thanks for the tip. And, also many thanks to Magnus for introducing me to
the concept of Time-to-Digital conversion. It is a brilliant and yet so
simple technique. (Until yesterday, I blissfully believed that a fast
clocking counter was one's best bet.) 

Accordingly, I did a bit of research on the topic:

Google took me to a lot of interesting sites (as Tom van Baak noted).
However, I found only one company, Acam (which is the one you also pointed
out), that sell these things inside an IC.

I also read the article posted earlier by Tom van Baak (Thanks Tom! This is
indeed a very comprehensive article.) It turns out that you can implement a
very elegant linear interpolator using a digital delay line inside a FPGA.
It is called the Vernier technique. From the article I understand that
resolutions of between 10s and 100s of picoseconds have been achieved for
various designs.

Has anyone else used this Vernier technique with delay lines? I seems pretty
neat to me.

It means my hardware doesn't need to change. A software update will do the
trick :)   

Regards,

Stephan.

PS: Thanks Ulrich for the link to your M12+T results. I was looking all over
the place for these results for a long time now. 





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