Design and implementation of double oscillator time-to-digital converter using SFQ logic circuits

We have designed, fabricated and tested a time-to-digital converter (TDC) using SFQ logic circuits. The proposed TDC consists of two sets of ring oscillators and binary counters, and a coincidence detector (CD), which detects the coincidence of the arrival of two SFQ pulses from two ring oscillators. The advantage of the proposed TDC is its simple circuit structure with wide measurement range. The time resolution of the proposed TDC is limited by the resolution of the CD, which is about 10 ps because it is made by an NDRO cell in this study. The circuits are implemented using NEC 2.5 kA/cm(2) Nb standard process and the CONNECT cell library. We have demonstrated the measurement of the propagation delay of a Josephson transmission line by the TDC with the time resolution of about 10 ps. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved