TDC: Enabling the Electronics of the Future
What if information were encoded not in voltage levels, but in time?
This is the idea behind Time-Mode Electronics: a different way of designing digital systems, where the precise measurement of when an event occurs becomes as important as the value of the signal itself. At the heart of this approach are Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) — devices capable of turning extremely small differences in time into digital information.
At TEDIEL, we see time as a new dimension of electronics.
Our research focuses on pushing the limits of temporal resolution, acquisition rate, channel density and programmability, developing TDC architectures that can bring precision timing from specialized ASICs into flexible, reconfigurable FPGA-based systems.
This approach opens the door to a wide range of applications where time is the measurement: from quantum photonics and single-photon detection to fluorescence lifetime imaging, high-energy and nuclear physics, Time-of-Flight sensing, LiDAR and medical imaging. The same underlying technology can be adapted to very different experimental and industrial requirements, without redesigning the entire system from scratch.
Our vision is to make high-performance timing more accessible, programmable and adaptable.
By exploiting the latest generations of FPGAs and SoCs, TEDIEL develops fully programmable TDC solutions that combine sub-picosecond time quantization, picosecond-level precision, high acquisition rates and multi-channel operation with the flexibility of digital reconfiguration. Timing, signal conditioning, processing and application-specific algorithms can be brought together in a single programmable platform.
This is more than a faster TDC. It is a different approach to instrumentation: turning time into a programmable resource.
We believe this is one of the foundations of the next generation of electronics — where increasingly fast devices make it possible to process information not only through logic levels, but through precisely controlled and measured events in time.
From measuring time to computing with time.