Time-to-digital converter
![A CMOS (rotary) traveling wave oscillator or delay line or distributed amplifier runs at a flip-flop compatible frequency, but has sharper edges and sub-edge resolution](/Images/godic/202502/16/CMOS_TW_OSC_0001035.png")
![sketch of the coarse counting method in TDCs: showing measurements of T in various relations to the clock pulses](/Images/godic/202502/16/CoarseCounting1035.png")
![Sketch of the Nutt interpolation method](/Images/godic/202502/16/Nutt1035.png")
![Similarity between a TDC (bottom) and a Delay Generator (top, but needs bottom for trigger). The strobe is gated by the oscillator to avoid a race with the carry bit](/Images/godic/202502/16/TDC_DTC_0001036.png")
In electronic instrumentation and signal processing, a time to digital converter (abbreviated TDC) is a device for recognizing events and providing a digital representation of the time they occurred. For example, a TDC might output the time of arrival for each incoming pulse. Some applications wish to measure the time interval between two events rather than some notion of an absolute time.