[time-nuts] Generating a solid PPS from 10Mhz source

Vlad time at patoka.org
Tue Jan 19 20:37:13 UTC 2016



> The nice thing about a FPGA (or CPLD) is that they come with a cute
> timing analyzer. You can indeed
> answer questions like this with a quite high level of confidence. That
> *assumes* that you bother to set
> up the timing analyzer :)

That true. Its nice looking "Timeng report". I saw the numbers there.

Performance Summary for Xilinx XC32C32A:

Min. Clock Period 3.300 ns.
Max. Clock Frequency (fSYSTEM) 303.030 MHz.

Clock to Setup (tCYC) 3.300 ns.
Clock Pad to Output Pad Delay (tCO) 3.700 ns.

Its always few nanoseconds delays. Which quite sad, since I was expect 
better from CPLD. With this "background", PICDIV looks much more 
attractive with its 2ps Jitter.
Long live for Tom and Microchip engineers !

D flip-flop looks like a good solution. However, now I am thinking it 
could do its own "timing correction" (skew/delay) to the signal. Looks 
like "classic" 74LS74 has similar delays as CPLD has.
Nothing is perfect. ;-)

> Regardless of the divider it’s self, you will have the sine to
> square conversion. You also
> may have a sensitivity on a square back to sine conversion. All of it
> (and the divider) will have both temperature
> and voltage sensitivity. Most of that will be in the “measure it and
> see” category.

I was using Wenzel "two 3906" solution. BTW, when I compare it to 
"74AC", I saw more spikes with it:

http://www.patoka.ca/OCXO/Vectron-74AC04b-2-OSQ.png
http://www.patoka.ca/OCXO/Vectron-74AC04-2-OSQ.png

Which make me thinking that 74AC/74HC logic make the conversion more 
"smooth". However, in my observations, I saw that "two 3906" is close to 
reflect the actual signal coming from OCXO. I mean if OCXO has some 
spike (noise), than it immediately will be noticed by "two 3906" schema. 
74AC/74HC solution somehow remove/ignore it. I don't know how to explain 
this. Its just from my setup and my observation and probably not correct 
at all.


> 
> Based on measurements, all of it comes out in the “no big deal”
> range for normal applications.
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 18, 2016, at 12:28 PM, Vlad <time at patoka.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Looking to the complex solutions for the frequency divider (CPLD/MCU), 
>> I start to think about skews and propagation delays. Its not obvious 
>> from the first glance. But I think such things exists.
>> It could be interesting to compare the numbers.  Is it worth to 
>> consider some correction to avoid phase difference between of input 
>> and output ?
>> 
>> 
>> On 2016-01-18 08:59, cfo wrote:
>>> On Wed, 13 Jan 2016 09:22:09 +0000, Jerome Blaha wrote:
>>>> Is there an easy circuit to build that can consistently deliver a 1 
>>>> PPS
>>>> from a 10MHz source with excellent resolution and repeatability?
>>> Ulrich B. has made an AVR 1PPS, for those that uses AVR's instead of 
>>> PIC's
>>> AVR PPSDIV 2008-09-06 - in bottom of page.
>>> http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/html/downloads.html
>>> The Mega8 version should be easy to port to an Arduino clone
>>> CFO
>>> _______________________________________________
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>> 
>> --
>> WBW,
>> 
>> V.P.
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-- 
WBW,

V.P.



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