Overview
High-precision time measurement plays an essential role in particle physics experiments. The combination of a discriminator and a time-to-digital converter (TDC) is one of the mainstream technical routes, with the TDC as its core component. TDCs are generally implemented either in FPGA or as application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC); the optimal solution is customized to the specific application.
This approach adopts either "amplification + discrimination + TDC" or "high-speed waveform sampling + digital timing" to achieve picosecond-level time resolution, suitable for particle time-of-flight, event time stamping, detector synchronization, coincidence selection and precision timing analysis.