JAJU648A November 2018 – April 2022 TLV3601 , TLV3601-Q1 , TLV3603 , TLV3603-Q1
To keep the design simple, low cost, and low power, the TDC7201 time-to-digital converter was chosen to measure the time delay instead of using a high-speed ADC. The TDC7201 is configured in its short-time measurement mode, which uses both cores of the device to allow for measurement accuracy to 0.25 ns. This configuration creates a system measurement accuracy of approximately 7.5 cm in a vacuum or 5 cm in a single mode fiber with a refraction index of 1.444. With the high bandwidth of the analog front-end driving the TDC7201, the full measurement is able to achieve an accuracy less than 10 cm with all error sources added. For more information on the TDC7201 short-time measurement mode, see the Short Time Measurement Using TDC7201 application report.
To control all components and process the digital information from the TDC7201, the design uses Texas Instrument's MSP430 LaunchPad™ featuring the MSP430FF5529 microcontroller. The MSP430FF5529 is one of TI's low-power series microcontrollers and the LaunchPad™ interface allows for an easy plug-and-play design that connects directly to a computer GUI using a universal serial bus (USB) cable. The microcontroller handles the commands to fire the laser diode and the timing setup and processing of information from the TDC7201.