Digital Instrument for Time Measurements: Small, Portable, High-Performance, Fully Programmable

Abstract

We present a small, portable, plug-and-play time measurement instrument entirely based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Its performance is state-of-the-art in terms of the most recent Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) solutions of Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs), and all operating features are fully-programmable. The instrument offers an excellent cost-performance and is suitable for detector test and time correlation measurement applications. More generally, the instrument is very well suited for fast-prototyping of systems where time measures are involved, at low cost and design effort. All the features of the instrument can be easily accessed through either the Graphical User Interface (GUI) or directly from the software Application Programming Interface (API).