Elsevier, Physics Procedia, (37), p. 1707-1714, 2012
DOI: 10.1016/j.phpro.2012.02.495
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A general procedure for precision timing calibration of waveform digitizing systems is presented. Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) implementing this functionality are increasingly used in high-energy physics as replacements for stand-alone time-to-digital and analog-to-digital modules. However, process variations cause such ASICs to have irregularly spaced timing intervals between samples, so careful calibration is required to improve the timing resolution of such systems. The procedure presented here exploits correlations between nearby samples of a sine wave of known frequency to obtain the time difference between them. As only the correlations are used, the procedure can be performed without knowledge of the phase of the input signal, and converges with smaller data samples than other common techniques. It also serves as a valuable diagnostic tool, allowing a fast, visual, qualitative check of gain mismatches between sampling cells and other ADC artifacts. Work is continuing to extend the procedure to fit for timing intervals in the face of such non-idealities. We present both the algorithm and example calibration results from a commercial oscilloscope and the PSEC-3 ASIC. For the latter, we have also applied the calibration to improve timing resolution in the readout of a prototype microchannel plate photomultiplier tube with a stripline anode configuration.