[time-nuts] How to measure Allan Deviation?

[Dr Bruce Griffiths]

Magnus

The drawback with a CPLD is that most have a relatively high dc supply 
current.
I have a couple of CPLD designs that work the way you advocated.
A CMOS divider has the attraction that its power supply current can be 
relatively small even when the (small duty cycle) output drives a 50 ohm 
load.
The other problem with CPLDs is most are surface mount and use small pad 
separations which can be problematic for home construction.
I have posted the pathological design to the list.
It is intended as a warning to be careful, even though one has these 
nice slow low power supply noise parts in the drawer which can be used 
to reliably generate a 1 PPS output, the divider will severely degrade 
the measurement accuracy. It is even so pathological that one cannot 
reliably resync the output to the input clock without resorting to 
exceedingly expensive heroic measures such as a triple or quadruple 
cascaded synchronisers (synchronising first to 100KHz output of 2nd 
4017, then to the 1MHz output of the first 4017 followed by  the 
expensive synchroniser) The final set of synchronisers probably requires 
a series of tapped delay lines that track the propagation delay of the 
first divider, eventually the last synchroniser is clocked by the input 
clock.
Whilst no experienced designer would even contemplate this its possible 
the less experienced may fall into this trap.

Bruce