Time-to-Digital Converter Compiler for On-Chip Instrumentation

This article proposes an automatic compiler for an on-chip time-to-digital converter (TDC) that can be used for monitoring the on-chip operating conditions such as temperature and supply voltage. The proposed compiler adopts a resilient architecture and supports self-calibration and range adjustment. In addition, a novel technique for fine-shrinking cell analysis is proposed to explore the tradeoffs among area, timing resolution, operating range, etc.