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Riga Event Timers have the ability to measure the interval between events with high resolution, on the order of picoseconds. However, they have several drawbacks, such as sensitivity to environmental temperature changes and an inability to capture the amplitude of the events. In this work, we present the ETAM: a next generation Event Timer. Its innovative features include adaptive correction of measurement errors based on an internal temperature sensor, and integrated peak-detector circuit to determine the amplitude of nanosecond-duration pulses. Evaluation shows that the ETAM has high thermal stability with a root mean square error (RMSE) of <3 ps in a temperature range between 0 and +40 °C, and accurate event amplitude measurement capability, with <2.3 mV RMSE in the 100–1000 mV range. These improvements allow the ETAM to be used in satellite laser ranging, optical time-domain reflectometry, and other field applications that require temperature- and amplitude-based time correction in addition to high robustness, performance, and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical solutions for amplitude and time measurements from digitized signals of the pseudo-Gaussian shape are considered. The least squares method (l.s.m.) is chosen as the algorithm to determine amplitude A and timestamp t 0. For a profile with an uncorrelated sampling the l.s.m. is reduced to analytical formulas consistent with the experiment. This permits to estimate the desired number of points N s on a profile. The obtained results for N s are illustrated with qualitative estimates in accordance with the Nyquist–Shannon–Kotelnikov sampling theorem. The optimality of the electronic filters forming the waveform is analyzed in terms of the excess noise factor. An analytical solution is found for the autocorrelation function from stochastic noise sources. It permits to define non-diagonal weight matrix elements in the l.s.m. with formulation of requirements for neglecting sampling correlations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]