[time-nuts] Acam TDC's

[Dan Kemppainen]

> At which resolution do you wish to get 40Msps? Tell me the single-shot 
> jitter figure. So far we had only several ksps of throughput in our TDC 
> circuit, but the bottleneck lies within a computer interface.
> 
> Anyway, it is not an easy task to get some 200MB/s into the computer in a 
> sustained fashion. (And to process such amounts of data in real time is 
> hard, too.)
> 

The plan was to pair it with a FPGA to make decisions on the data. The
result of the decisions would have been passed further down the digital
signal chain. In order to achieve what we needed to see, we would have
had to measure time with a resolution on the order of 50pS, at a rate of
30 to 40 million times per second.

Eventually we went to a high bandwidth analog system, and were able
achieve our goals. It would have been nice to do it digitally, though.

That was a few years ago, and it feels like ancient history now! :)

Dan