A Low Power Pulse Generator For Test Platform Applications

A 62ps timing resolution pulse generator (PG) is presented. The PG adopts the multi-phase ring oscillator and the pulse combiner circuit (PCC) to achieve the low timing error. The PCC can decide an arbitrary waveform via 16 phase outputs. PCC adopts the coarse-tuning stage (CTS) and the fine-tuning (FTS) to define the operational frequency range and the timing resolution, respectively. Hence, PCC uses edge combiner (EC) to combine the period window of CTS. The latency of PG is only 3 cycle times. The operational frequency range of PG is from 15 MHz to 245 MHz. The timing resolution and average accuracy of PG are 62.5 ps and +/- 0.5 LSB, respectively. The RMS jitter and peak-to-peak jitter of PG are 6.55 ps and 66.67 ps, respectively, at 245 MHz.