A Pico-Second Timing System on a Chip (SoC) for Magnetostrictive Displacement Sensors (MDSs)

Based on the Wiedemann effect, Magnetostrietive Displacement Sensors (MDSs) can measure displacement without contact so that it is free of wear. Therefore, compared with other displacement sensors, the MDSs has a longer service life and is more adaptable to harsh environments. The MDSs are getting more attention and are widely used in industry control system. Precision time interval is the key aspect of the MDSs. In this paper, a pico-second timing system on chip (SoC) is designed in a 180 nm CMOS process for the MDSs applications. SoC is proposed for the MDSs applications. The chip integrates a high speed comparator and a time-to-digital converter (TDC) to build a fine time measurement chain. A 32-MHz microcontroller unit (MCU) realized by RISC-V core with two-stage pipeline is realized for system control. Test results show that the comparator temporal noise is around 1 mV and the TDC achieves a resolution of 156 ps.