[time-nuts] Si5451B (was: Good clean-up oscillators)

[Achim Gratz]

Achim Gratz writes:
>> If it's any good, buy a Pi-Zero, rip out the X-tal and feed it
>> from your LPRO instead.  If you only need one GPIO pin, I doubt
>> the exact clock frequency matters much.
>
> I still want to use a GPS timing module and feed the 19.2MHz in from
> there.  However, I'd rather lock the quartz from the external reference
> so when that input fails the quartz will at least keep the system
> running.  It _should_ be possible to capacitively couple the reference
> to the board, but I haven't tried that yet.

Towards that end, I found a small nice looking breakout board with an
Si5351B for around $35 (you get to solder the SMA and headers on
yourself, the SMD stuff is already done).  Replacing the XO with a cheap
OCXO would add another $35 it seems and I should be able to feed all
rasPi and Tinkerboard with something a lot more stable.  Has anybody
worked with that chip before and can share some experiences?

I'm also looking into getting one of my Spartan-6 boards to function as
a TIC.  Using ISERDES and overclocking a bit beyond the datasheet values
should get me to 1ns resolution without any interpolation and at least
the Atlys board has enough LVDS pairs to monitor all of my systems in
parallel.  Maybe I can even do some interpolation to go to somewhere in
the 50…100ps resolution, although I don#t really think it'll give me
much of an advantage for this application.  For various reasons it seems
preferable to move the signals around via LVDS instead of CMOS, so if
anybody can share some experiences of which of the many single-ended to
differential converters are useful and which ones to avoid (if any)
would be helpful.


Regards,
Achim.
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