High-Precision Digital-to-Time Converter with High Dynamic Range for 28 nm 7-Series Xilinx FPGA and SoC Devices

Over the last ten years, the need for high-resolution time-domain digital signal production has grown exponentially. More than ever, applications call for a digital-to-time converter (DTC) that is extremely accurate and precise. Skew compensation and camera shutter operation represent just a few examples of such applications. The advantages of adopting a flexible and rapid time-to-market strategy focused on fast prototyping using programmable logic devices—such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and system-on-chip (SoC)—have become increasingly evident. These benefits outweigh those of performance-focused yet expensive application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Despite the availability of various architectures, the high non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs make them unsuitable for low-volume production, especially in research or prototyping environments. To address this trend, we introduce an innovative DTC IP-Core with a resolution, also known as least significant bit (LSB), of 52 ps, compatible with all Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs and SoCs. Measurements have been performed on a low-end Artix-7 XC7A100TFTG256-2, guaranteeing a jitter lower than 50 ps r.m.s. and offering a high dynamic range up to 56 ms. With resource utilization below 1% and a dynamic power dissipation of 285 mW for our target FPGA, the design maintains excellent differential and integral nonlinearity errors (DNL/INL) of 1.19 LSB and 1.56 LSB, respectively.