Postdoc or experienced researcher in radiation hardened time-to-digital conversion

Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) are a special type of data converters, similar to Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Where ADCs convert voltages to digital words, TDCs quantize time-intervals to the digital domain, and are comparable to accurate chronometers. TDCs can achieve record breaking accuracies in the order of picosecond (ps), making them perfectly suitable for applications involving optical Time-of-Flight measurements. Accurate time measurement is also needed in harsh radiation environments such as the readout of the many radiation detectors in high-energy physics experiments such as those at CERN in Geneva, but also for Space systems and and many terrestrial nuclear applications. Radiation impacts electronics in 2 ways: (1) long term (cumulative) degeneration known as Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects and (2) instantaneous errors known as Single-Event Effects (SEEs) which challenges the design of radiation hardened TDCs. In previous projects we have tackled many of these challenges in different high-performance TDC chips.

This (postdoctoral) research position targets to address three mandatory aspects to bring the technology to a demonstrator level in order to  open the roadmap for commercialization.

1. Current prototypes only contain one channel, meaning only one start-stop event can be measured per chip. Typical applications demand multiple, synchronized and (self) calibrated channels. Within this postdoctoral project, you will develop a multi-channel TDC based on the previously demonstrated TDC core.

2. The power consumption of current prototypes is relatively high for space or battery powered applications where power consumption is a bottleneck. The TDC core alone consumes 30 mW. Hence the second objective is to research improvements to reduce the power consumption to 10 mW + 5 mw/channel, making it more attractive for partners to adopt this device.

3. Finally, you will develop demonstration samples to allow customers to integrate the converters as part of their prototypes.

Each innovation will require radiation testing since new circuitry is included. We foresee both TID experiments and laser tests (available in our ADVISE RELY lab) and heavy ion tests in a cyclotron facility (such as UCL or Univ. Jyvaskyla).