Monolithic time-to-digital converter chips for time-correlated single-photon counting and fluorescence lifetime measurements

We present a low-power Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) chip, fabricated in a standard cost-effective 0.35 μm CMOS technology, which provides 160 ns dynamic range, 10 ps timing resolution and Differential Non-Linearity better than 0.01 LSB rms. This chip is the core of a compact TDC module equipped with an USB 2.0 interface for user-friendly control and data-acquisition. The TDC module is suitable for a wide variety of applications such as Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (FLIM), time-resolved spectroscopy, Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy (DOS), Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (OTDR), quantum optics, etc. In particular, we show the application of our TDC module to fluorescence lifetime measurements.