Swabian – Timing & Frequency Analyses with Time Taggers

We demonstrate a software-based approach to measure single-sideband (SSB) phase-noise spectra and Allan deviation from picosecond time-tag streams acquired with Swabian Instruments Time Tagger devices. Periodic electrical inputs generate event timestamps onboard the hardware whenever the signal crosses a user-defined trigger level, producing a unified time-tag stream that is transferred to a host PC for processing in the Time Tagger Software. Phase-noise spectra L(f) are obtained using windowed Welch estimation on a quasi-logarithmic frequency grid, enabling integrated timing-jitter extraction from the same dataset. Allan analysis achieves a timing-electronics floor of 4×10−13 at 1 s. The approach supports multichannel acquisition and parallel multi-device operation for differential link measurements, and provides real-time pulse-per-second (1PPS) monitoring to verify synchronization.

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