H. Ogawa et al.

/ Journal of Advanced Research in Physics 3(1), 011204 (2012)

A Time-of-Flight Measurement Circuit Using

a Multiple-Stage Amplifier for a Range Finder
with Wide Working Range
Hiroki Ogawa1,*, Keita Yasutomi2 and Shoji Kawahito2
1
2

Graduate School of Science and Technology, Shizuoka University

Research Institute of Electronics, Shizuoka University

Abstract This paper describes a time-of-flight (TOF)

measurement circuit using a multiple-stage amplifier suitable
for a TOF range finder. The multiple-stage amplifier together
with a comparator in each stage allows us to obtain multiple
TOF signals and to estimate the signal intensity dependent
delay time of the measurement circuits. Using the estimated
delay time of the measurement circuit, an accurate TOF can be
estimated in a very wide working range. Simulation results
show that the cascaded 6-stage amplifier works at the input
signal photocurrent level from 10nA to 10mA sufficient range
measurement accuracy in three decades of the working range.
Keywords time-of-flight, range finder, cascaded multiplestage amplifier, wide working range

I. INTRODUCTION
RANGE finders based on a time-of-flight (TOF) method
are a preferred choice for distance measurements with wide
working range [1]-[4]. In the TOF range finders, the distance
to a target is determined by finding the roundtrip TOF of a
light pulse. If the distance between the light source and
target is very long, the range accuracy is affected by the
attenuation of the light pulse power. Furthermore the light
signal intensity is also affected by weather conditions such
as in the rain or fog. The light signal attenuation causes a
delay time in a TOF measurement circuit and a resulting
measurement error because the small signal amplitude has a
small driving force in the amplifier used in the TOF
measurement circuit, causing a longer response time. On the
other hand, if the distance between the light source to target
is very short, a large amount of photocurrent signal due to
the reflected light pulse with large optical power may cause
the saturation of the signal in the TOF measurement circuit.
These characteristics in the TOF measurements used in
conventional systems make the development of a range
finder with very wide working range difficult.
This paper proposes a TOF measurement circuit suitable
for a range finder with very wide working range. The
proposed circuit technique uses a cascaded multiple-stage
amplifier together with comparators used at the output of
each stage for expanding the dynamic range of measuring
Manuscript received October 12, 2011.
*
Corresponding author

signals and the resulting wide working range by using

multiple TOF signals obtained in the multiple stages.
According to results of circuit simulation, a designed 6-stage
cascaded amplifier can measure the TOF for the range of the
input photocurrent level from 10nA to 10A. Since it is
possible to estimate the delay time in the internal circuit and
correct the measurement error of the TOF, the proposed
multiple-point TOF measurement technique is able to
greatly improve the range accuracy and working range.
II. TOF MEASUREMENT USING MULTIPLE-STAGE
AMPLIFICATION.
A. Conventional TOF Range Finder
A pulsed TOF range finding technique is a mature
technology. Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of a
conventional basic TOF range finder system. This system
mainly consists of a computer for measuring distance and
controlling the entire system, a laser diode (LD) transmitter
and a receiver for sensing TOF signal lights. Fig. 2 shows
the basic model of the TOF measurement circuit. A certain
light pulse which has range information due to the TOF is
received by a photo detector, such as a photodiode. The
charge signal generated by the light pulse is detected in a
frontend charge amplifier and then the delay time or TOF of
the light pulse is detected by a comparator which is
connected at the charge amplifier output. The output of the
comparator is used for a gating signal to measure the TOF
using a counter.

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the basic TOF range finder system.

Fig. 2. Basic model of the conventional TOF measurement circuit.

H. Ogawa et al. / Journal of Advanced Research in Physics 3(1), 011204 (2012)

Although there are a lot of methods to measure the time

interval in TOF range finder systems [4], the use of a time to
digital converter (TDC) is straight forward. The TDC
measures the time interval between the start signal provided
by a command from the system and stop signal generated by
the comparator output that indicates the TOF. The TOF can
be measured using the TDC output and a post-processing in
the computer.
In the case of a basic TOF range finder system, the delay
time which is mainly caused by a response time of charge
amplifier in the TOF measurement circuit is added to the
TOF information. It causes the measurement error of TOF
distance.
Obviously the measured total delay time Tm is the sum of
the TOF and the delay time of the system, i.e.,
(1)
=
Tm TTOF + Td
where Tm is the measured total delay time, TTOF is the true
time of flight of light pulse and Td is the delay time of the
measurement circuit. Delay time Td varies depending on the
signal intensity of light pulse. This means that the range
accuracy is affected by the attenuation of the light pulse of
measuring signals. As the distance between the light source
and the target becomes longer, a received signal generated
by the light pulse becomes weaker. It then causes the
response of amplifier to be slow due to the light signal
attenuation. This characteristic of the conventional TOF
measurement circuits makes the high precision TOF
measurement difficult especially if a sensor requires a wide
dynamic range of the light source which needs for a long
range measurement.

capacitance of the n-th stage, and Gn is the gain of the n-th

stage. The final stage output can be written as
1
(4)
Vo ( N ) =GN GN 1 GN 2 G2
I ph dt
Cf1
Equation (4) means that the multiple-stage amplification has
very high total gain and multiple wide-range gains.
For measuring the TOF, the output of each stage amplifier
is connected to a comparator. When a light pulse is received
and signal charge by the light pulse comes into frontend
charge amplifier, measured times related to the TOF can be
obtained in comparator outputs that respond to the light
pulse. The number of comparator outputs that respond to the
light pulse depends on the intensity of the light. The n-th
comparator output XC(n) to measure the TOF is given by
0 (if Vo (n) < VTH )
(5)
X C ( n) =
1 (if Vo (n) VTH )
where VTH is the threshold voltage given at the comparator.
The comparator output is used for gating in a counter to
measure the TOF.

Fig. 3. The cascaded amplification circuit consists of the multi-stages

cascaded connection of amplifiers

B. Proposal Method Using a Multiple-Stage Amplifier

Figure 3 shows the proposed cascaded multiple-stage
amplifier suitable for an accurate TOF measurement with
wide working range. Figure 4 shows the model of a TOF
measurement circuit by use of the multi-stages amplification.
The frontend stage is a charge amplifier for converting
photo signal charge into a voltage. The output voltage of the
frontend charge amplifier is given by

Vo (1) =

1
I ph dt
Cf1

(2)

where Cf1 is the feedback capacitance of the charge

amplifier, and Iph is the photo current of input signal.
The amplifiers in the second and the successive stages are
implemented
by
non-inverting
capacitive-feedback
amplifiers. The output of each stage is plugged into each
non-inverting input terminal of the next stage. Using this
multiple-stage amplification, the total gains at the latter
stages become very large. Hence it is possible to detect a
quite small amount of light signal by the use the cascaded
multiple-stage amplifier circuit.
Since the second-stage and successive stages consist of a
non-inverting amplifier using a capacitive feedback circuit,
the gain of each stage is determined by a ratio of a feedback
capacitor to a grounded capacitor in each stage. The output
voltage of the n-th stage is given by
C f , n + Ci , n
(3)
1) GnVo ( N 1)
V=
Vo (n=
o ( n)
C f ,n
where Cf,n and Ci,n are the feedback and input grounded

Fig. 4. The model of a TOF measurement circuit by use of the multi-stages

amplification.

Fig. 5. Amplifiers for TOF measurement circuit.VDD is 2.5V and ISS

is20A.

H. Ogawa et al. / Journal of Advanced Research in Physics 3(1), 011204 (2012)

C. Circuit Simulations
The behavior of the cascaded multiple-stage amplifier is
simulated by a circuit simulator SPECTRE. In the circuit
simulation, device parameters of a 0.25m standard CMOS
process technology are used. Figure 5 shows amplifier
circuit which is used in the TOF measurement circuit of Fig.
3. The feedback capacitance and the input grounded
capacitance of each stage are set to be 0.1pF and 0.9pF
respectively. The resulting gain of all the stage (1 + Ci,n/Cf,n)
is set to be 10. Figure 6 shows the simulation results for the
delay times of the 6 amplifier outputs as a function of
photocurrent at the receiver. In this simulation, the delay
times at the outputs of the 6-stage amplifier are measured for
the signal current intensity range from 10nA to 10mA. The
pulse width of the input photocurrent is set to be 10n second.
In the range from 10nA to 10mA, the delay times of all the
stages are measured at 30 points of intensity level. For better
measurement accuracy and stability, the delay time of the
amplifier should be as small as possible. In high
photocurrent level, the output of earlier stages has smaller
delay time. In small photocurrent level, the output of earlier
stages has large delay and may fail to detect the signal at the
comparator because the amplitude does not reach to the
measurement threshold. On the other hand, the output of
latter stages which has a large gain has smaller delay time in
small photo current region and can cover down to very small
photocurrent level of 10nA. The results of Fig. 6 suggests
that the delay time which includes the TOF of light pulse can
be measured in wide dynamic range by selecting proper
outputs of the 6-stage amplifier. This is why the TOF range
finder using the multiple-stage amplifier enables to expand
the dynamic range. One can notice in the results of Fig. 6
that the delay time variation of the 6-stage amplifier
becomes gradually small when the amount of photocurrent
signal is larger than approximately 30A, and it is almost
unchanged when a photocurrent signal exceeds 1mA. The
multiple outputs can be used for estimating the delay time of
the TOF measurement circuits including the frontend charge
amplifier, multiple-stage amplifier, and comparators as
described in the next section.
III. TOF ESTIMATION USING MULTIPLE-STAGE
AMPLIFIER OUTPUTS
A. Estimation of Delay Time of Measurement Circuits
As explained in the previous section, the TOF
measurement circuit using the multiple-stage amplifier
enables to obtain multiple time signals which include the
TOF of light pulse and the delay time of the measurement
circuits themselves. The measured total delay time of the nth stage output Tm(n) is given by,
(6)
Tm =
(n) TTOF + Td (n)
where TTOF is the time of flight of the light pulse between a
target and the TOF range finder, and Td(n) is the delay time
at the n-th stage output of the measurement circuits.
Obviously, the measured total delay time of the (n-1)-th
stage output Tm(n-1) is given by,
(7)
Tm (n 1)= TTOF + Td (n 1)
By taking the difference between (6) and (7), we have

Tm (n 1) Tm (n=
) Td (n 1) Td (n)

(8)
Td (n)
Equation (8) means that the difference of delay time of the
two amplifier outputs is independent of the TOF. Figure 7
shows Tm(n-1)-Tm(n) as a function of photocurrent. Using the
result of Fig. 7, the relationship between Td(n) and the
photocurrent is uniquely pre-determined, and it is expressed
as a function of photocurrent, i.e.,
(9)
Td (n) =
f , n ( I ph )
Using Tm(n) =Tm(n-1)-Tm(n), the amount of photocurrent
can be expressed as
(10)
I ph =f ,1n (Td (n)) =f ,1n (Tm (n))
where

f ,n1 is the inverse function of f ,n . Td(n) can also be

expressed as a function of photocurrent as follows:

Td (n) = f n ( I ph )

(11)

Obviously,

f=
f n 1 ( I ph ) f n ( I ph ) .
, n ( I ph )

(12)

Using (6), (10) and (11), the TOF can be expressed as

=
TTOF Tm (n) Td (n)

=
Tm (n) f n ( f ,1n (Tm (n))

(13)

Equation (13) suggests that the TOF can be estimated using

the measured Tm(n) and Tm(n-1) and pre-determined
relationship between (Tm(n), Tm(n-1)) and photocurrent.
B. Improvement of Accuracy Using Multiple Outputs
Depending on the photocurrent level, multiple amplifier
outputs more than two can be used for calculating the TOF
with (13) and the measurement error can be reduced by
averaging multiple calculated TOFs. Denoting the calculated
TOF using the n-th and (n-1)-th amplifier outputs TTOF(n),
the averaged TOF can be expressed as

TTOF =

1 N
TTOF (n)
N 1 n=2

(14)

if first through n-th amplifier outputs are available for the

TOF calculations.
C. Simulations for Range Finding
Simulations to demonstrate that an accurate TOF-based
range measurement is possible are shown in Fig. 8. The
target range to be measured is varied from 0.2m to 200m.
The TOF and intensity of light pulse are varied based on a
model that the light intensity is inversely proportional to the
square of target range. In this way, the maximum
photocurrent is set to be 10mA at the range of 0.2m. As
shown in Fig. 8(a), the range can be accurately measured.
The measurement error given by the difference of the ideal
range from the measured range is shown in Fig. 8(b). The
maximum measurement error is within 0.5cm for the target
range from 0.2m to 200m.

H. Ogawa et al. / Journal of Advanced Research in Physics 3(1), 011204 (2012)

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Fig. 6. Delay Times of the 6-stage amplification circuit in regard to

intensity of the input photocurrent.

In this paper, a new TOF range finding method using a

multiple-stage amplifier has been presented. The multiple
outputs for the TOF measurement are used for calculating
the signal-dependent delay time of the circuit and
automatically correcting the measurement error due to the
circuit delay. Circuit simulation results have demonstrated
that a TOF range finder by using the proposed method is
effective for an accurate range measurement in a very wide
dynamic range of optical signals and the resulting wide
working range. A demonstration using a prototype chip of
the TOF measurement circuit with the multiple stage
amplifiers is left as a near-future subject.
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Fig. 7. Delay Time Difference between 6-stage amplification circuit and

others.

(a)

(b)
Fig. 8. Simulations for range measurements (a). Measured Range of Ideal
and Simulated. (b). Measurement Error.

[4]

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