PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15944561
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-04
Publication Date: 2019-02
Patent Classification: ["356", "005010"]

Abstract:
Representative embodiments of the present technology include a device for measuring distance to an object. The device comprises a light emitter configured to emit an outbound light pulse and a light sensor configured to receive a returning light pulse and output a pulse signal representing the returning light pulse. The device further comprises a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) coupled to the light sensor and including a time-to-digital converter (TDC) having a series of sequentially coupled delay units. Individual sequentially coupled delay units are associated with corresponding individual delay times. At least some of the sequentially coupled delay units have different individual delay times. The TDC is configured to measure timing information of the pulse signal based at least in part on the individual delay times of the sequentially coupled delay units. The device further includes a controller configured to calculate the distance to the object based on the timing information.

Claim (Index 11):
The device of  claim 1  wherein the TDC includes a latch unit having a plurality of latches, individual latches being coupled to corresponding sequential delay units, and wherein the TDC is configured to:\n propagate an input signal through the series of sequentially coupled delay units, the input signal corresponding to one or more portions of the pulse signal; \n determine a fine time value for the input signal using the series of sequentially coupled delay units, wherein the fine time value corresponds to a sum of the individual delay times of a subset of the series of sequentially coupled delay units that receives the input signal prior to a next clock cycle of the FPGA; \n determine a coarse time for the input signal measurement based on a number of elapsed clock cycles of the FPGA; and \n measure the timing information based on a difference between the coarse time value and the fine time value.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 2.0
- Percentile: 91.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.23611
- Patent Class: 356.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: none
- Component Type: 0
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15944729', '13559909', '12639003', '12113955', '12874462']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.6656201637372348
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.4897154719351859
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.6480296945570299
- Mean Citation Score: 155.37644799999995
- Max Citation Score: 218.0262
- Similarity Product: 171.6096862931728

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 0
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test