Design and Demonstration of a Single-Flux-Quantum Multi-Stop Time-to-Digital Converter for Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry

作者：Sano Kyosuke^*; Yamanashi Yuki; Yoshikawa Nobuyuki

来源：IEICE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRONICS, 2014, E97C(3): 182-187.

DOI：10.1587/transele.E97.C.182

• SFQ circuits
• TDC
• TOF-MS
• SSID
• FIFO
• Josephson integrated circuits

We have been developing a superconducting time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) system, which utilizes a superconductive strip ion detector (SSID) and a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) multi-stop time-to-digital converter (TDC). The SFQ multi-stop TDC can measure the time intervals between multiple input signals and directly convert them into binary data. In this study, we designed and implemented 24-bit SFQ multi-stop TDCs with a 3 x 24-bit FIFO buffer using the AIST Nb standard process (STP2), whose time resolution and dynamic range are 100 ps and 1.6 ms, respectively. The timing jitter of the TDC was investigated by comparing two types of TDCs: one uses an on-chip SFQ clock generator (CG) and the other uses a microwave oscillator at room temperature. We confirmed the correct operation of both TDCs and evaluated their timing jitter. The experimentally-obtained timing jitter is about 40 ns and 700 ps for the TDCs with and without the on-chip SFQ CO, respectively, for the measured time interval of 50 mu s, which linearly increases with increase of the measured time interval.

• 出版日期2014-3