On 07/01/11 23:45, Tijd Dingen wrote:
--- On Thu, 1/6/11, Magnus Danielson<mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org> wrote:
From: Magnus Danielson<mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] No State Of The Art Counter
To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement"<time-nuts@febo.com>
Date: Thursday, January 6, 2011, 10:05 PM
On 01/06/2011 08:02 PM, Tijd Dingen
wrote:
To whom it may concerns,
Currently I am building a DIY frequency counter. Since
this is my first serious counter project I am trying to keep
things simple, hence It Will Not Be State Of The Art. Maybe
a not-too-difficult hobby level counter will be of interest
to some, so I'd thought I'd post here...
The architecture in a couple of bulletpoints:
- fpga based as much as possible to keep the parts
count down
- coarse counters running at max 200 MHz for now
- interpolation is done using TDC's. The TDC's look
suspiciously much like tapped delay lines and are
implemented inside the fpga, using mainly the carry chains.
- 10000 continuous time stamps per second
- 500 ps timestamp resolution. And with resolution I
mean the smallest resolvable thingy (related to bin size),
not precision nor accuracy.
500 ps single-shot resolution is what you probably want to
say.
Something like that yes. :)
How will the input side work? How will you handle input
signals of various kinds? In particular sine of various
amplitudes and frequencies. Slew-rate can be a limiting
factor as white noise will convert into jitter if hitting a
straight comparator. Choice of trigger point can be done to
achieve lowest jitter, so just AC-blocking and trigger on
the 0V may not be the best solution if shape is not well
known. Noise of input stage comes into play.
I am glad you asked. :) This is still one big To Be Determined at this point.
As you say, the choice of trigger point has a large impact on jitter. Do you
have any suggestions on how to achieve this? Either for the situation where the
signal shape is well known or not so well known.
...
Well, you do have comparators and programmable trigger level. There is
no magic to that side. But do care about bandwidth. It might be needed
to actually not use a comparator up-front but rather let there be one or
two stages of gain, where the first one DC-shifts the signal with the
trigger level. This way you gain yourself to a higher slew-rate. This is
really what Collins-style ZCD do. The trick is to balance the gain and
noise-bandwidths such that you get optimum slew-rate bandwidth for
lowest added noise.
The timestamps are transmitted over usb to the pc for
number crunching. The idea is to do some curve fitting to
get a frequency estimate, computate Allan Deviation, and do
the obligatory plots. With regard to Allan Deviation, as
long as I make sure the measurements have zero dead time, I
can compute Allan Deviation using the raw time stamps,
right?
Yes. Make sure time-stamps has a format such that software
can do time-wrapping extension.
Will do!
regards,
Fred
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