Design of Reconfigurable Time-to-Digital Converter Based on Cascaded Time Interpolators for Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (†)

This paper presents a reconfigurable time-to-digital converter (TDC) used to quantize the phase of the impedance in electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The TDC in the EIS system must handle a wide input-time range for analysis in the low-frequency range and have a high resolution for analysis in the high-frequency range. The proposed TDC adopts a coarse counter to support a wide input-time range and cascaded time interpolators to improve the time resolution in the high-frequency analysis without increasing the counting clock speed. When the same large interpolation factor is adopted, the cascaded time interpolators have shorter measurement time and smaller chip area than a single-stage time interpolator. A reconfigurable time interpolation factor is adopted to maintain the phase resolution with reasonable measurement time. The fabricated TDC has a peak-to-peak phase error of less than 0.72° over the input frequency range from 1 kHz to 512 kHz and the phase error of less than 2.70° when the range is extended to 2.048 MHz, which demonstrates a competitive performance when compared with previously reported designs.