Tom Van Baak wrote:
The simpler and cheaper D flipflop precedence detector used together with hardware sawtooth correction has far higher resolution. It also has the advantage of not requiring any high frequency clocks.BruceSince Rick & Dr TAC brought it up some months ago, does anyone have measurements for this approach yet? Also what is its equivalent resolution; i.e., what resolution would a conventional TIC need to be to match the behavior of the D-flipflop approach, all other factors equal? /tvb
TomWith say a 2ns rms noise on the corrected PPS output, a TIC would need an rms quantisation noise less than 1/3 of this to avoid significantly degrading the measurement noise. The corresponding TIC resolution would be about 7ns (140MHz). However to achieve accurate averaging the required rms jitter at the TIC input is around 1 clock period which implies that a TIC clock period of around 2ns (500MHz) is required. If the receiver timing noise is greater then a lower frequency clock can be used. The D flipflop approach produces a degradation of less than 2dB with respect to an ideal TIC with infinite resolution. The other advantage is that such a 1 bit TIC automatically adapts to the timing noise that is present.
The most cost effective way of achieving perhaps a dB or so improvement is to use an ADC as a TIC, sampling an input sinewave produced by dividing down and low pass filtering the output of the OCXO on the leading edge of the PPS signal. A resolution equivalent to using a 1GHz or faster clock is easily achieved. The cost of suitable ADCs is relatively low.
Neither of these solutions requires using clocks faster than 10MHz or so. Nor are particularly esoteric high speed logic devices required. Although ACMOS devices are desirable, even HCMOS devices should be satisfactory, particularly if given 200 millisec to resolve any metastable state.
The circuit schematic attached also provides 100ns (with a 10MHz clock) guardbands either side of the edge that is locked to the hardware corrected PPS signal. For example U103 3Q, 4Q, 5Q are used as precedence detectors the PPS being locked to U102 Q4 with Q3 and Q5 acting as guardbands transitions to allow detection of when the PPS leading edge is 100ns or more away from the transition on U102 Q4. This allows rejection of outliers.
Bruce
1 bit TIC phase detector.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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