Speaker
Description
This study presents the development of a high-precision time measurement system for Micro-Channel Plate Photomultiplier Tubes, combining a custom front-end electronics ASIC and a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) ASIC. The system aims to improve the time resolution of current photon detector, enabling critical applications in high-energy physics experiments, such as particle identification and precise time-of-flight reconstruction.
The TDC ASIC adopts a differential delay-loop architecture (inspired by a 0.18 μm SMIC CMOS process-based design), featuring dynamic delay calibration and dual-loop structures to mitigate process variations. The FEE ASIC incorporates a low-noise transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and a threshold discriminator to minimize timing jitter in the signal chain, ensuring robust signal conditioning for the fast response of MCP-PMTs
The ASICs have been successfully fabricated and functionally verified. The TDC ASIC achieve a l LSB of 12.04 ps, with differential nonlinearity (DNL) < ±0.5 LSB and integral nonlinearity (INL) < ±1.0 LSB. Future work will focus on system-level integration of the ASICs with MCP-PMTs, followed by experimental validation under real-world physics scenarios to evaluate performance boundaries. This work paves the way for practical deployment of sub-10 ps timing systems in next-generation particle detectors and quantum optics research.
