From my understanding the bandwidth of an input signal to an ADC is defined as the range of frequencies the signal consists of, which is calculated as the difference between the highest and lowest frequency within the signal band. So ok, but what about a time to digital converter (TDC)? How can one define the bandwidth here?
A TDC takes in two inputs, usually called Start and Stop signals, and measures the time difference between the two. For example, the input stream might be like this
What does input signal bandwidth mean here?
EDIT
What confuses me is this Sigma-Delta TDC paper for example. It says:
In the MASH Sigma-Delta TDC, there is also a special relation between the OSR and full scale input range. The bandwidth of the input signal, BW, is set to 100 kHz in this design. The sampling clock of the TDC system is then equal to 2 BW OSR. Due to the input signal’s timing nature, the peak-to-peak full scale input signal amplitude has to be smaller than one period of the sampling clock.
Now according to this, if OSR=25, the system clock is found to be 5MHz, which means that the PP FS input range has to be smaller than 200ns.So not sure what the physical interpretation of BW is here.
In another paper I found a comparison table which compares different architectures:
The papers indexed 26 and 28 have the same 50MS/s sampling frequency, but the BW in former case is 10 times more. The FS input range in both cases is more or less the same. Anyway, I cannot turn my head over how or in what manner BW could limit system performance?