An ultra-high timing resolution pulse generator with spur suppression and correction of errors based on real-time computation.

In this paper, a novel ultra-high timing resolution pulse generator is proposed. It is based on the waveform real-time computation method. Through real-time computing and filtering of the waveform samples, a pulse with a 0.1 ps timing resolution pulse could be generated at a 2.5 GSPS sampling rate. Based on the waveform real-time computation method, jitters are injected into the waveform time parameter to break the harmonic components caused by non-integer multiples of the sampling rate and waveform frequency. Waveform spurs are further suppressed using this approach. The pulse error correction is achieved by designing digital filters that complement the waveform distortion features. The complementary digital filters are then combined as Farrow filter coefficients by polynomial fitting. Based on the real-time computation method, pulse width modulation, frequency modulation, and amplitude modulation are easy to realize. The implemented pulse generator has four channels, whose minimum pulse width, edge time, frequency range, and amplitude range are 4, 2.5 ns, 1 µHz-120 MHz, and 50 mVpp-5 Vpp, respectively. All timing resolution and timing accuracy of pulse width, edge time, pulse period, and channel delay are 0.1 and 50 ps, respectively. Timing parameters can be changed continuously without glitches.

A multi-functional arbitrary timing generator based on a digital-to-time converter.

This paper proposes a new high-resolution digital-to-time converter architecture based on a field programmable gate array and digital-to-analog converter (DAC). A real-time algorithm of time--amplitude mapping is proposed, which converts the vertical resolution of the DAC to the timing resolution and realizes the ultra-high resolution timing signal generation. Moreover, the relationship between the timing resolution and the vertical resolution and the sampling rate of DAC is discussed. Based on this, arbitrarily distributed random timing signals and editable timing signal sequence functions are realized. This method is verified in the experiment on Xilinx XCKU040 and Texas Instrument DAC37J82. Furthermore, a timing resolution of 1 ps is realized. A time range of 4.2 ns to 999 s, an editable sequence length of 1-128k, and excellent nonlinear performance are achieved. In addition, functions for arbitrarily distributed random timing signals and signal bursts are tested. This method can be flexibly deployed on existing hardware and satisfy almost all test requirements.

Ultra-narrow pulse generator with precision-adjustable pulse width.

In this paper, a novel ultra-narrow pulse generation approach is proposed. It is based on the decomposition and synthesis of pulse edges. Through controlling their relative delay, an ultra-narrow pulse could be generated. By employing field programmable gate array digital synthesis technology, the implemented pulse generator is with programmable ability. The amplitude of pulse signals is controlled by the radio frequency amplifiers and bias tees, and high precision can be achieved. More importantly, the proposed approach can break through the limitation of device's propagation delay and optimize the resolution and the accuracy of the pulse width significantly. The implemented pulse generator has two channels, whose minimum pulse width, frequency range, and amplitude range are 100 ps, 15 MHz-1.5 GHz, and 0.1 Vpp-1.8 Vpp, respectively. Both resolution of pulse width and channel delay are 1 ps, and amplitude resolution is 10 mVpp.