Tutorial: Fundamentals of Time-Based Circuits

Time-based circuits have recently been developed as an alternative and enhancement to voltage-based signal processing due to the availability of advanced process nodes with fast transistors and low supply voltages. These time-based circuits offer unique attributes, ranging from simple, area-efficient quantizers to more complex techniques for time-based processing such as interpolation and noise shaping. This tutorial will cover the fundamentals and metrics of time-based circuits, highlight a number of architectures that directly utilize time, and discuss tradeoffs for these circuits in the context of various application requirements, including a comparison to more traditional voltage-based circuits.