[time-nuts] GPSDO Alternatives

David davidwhess at gmail.com
Fri Dec 7 01:42:51 UTC 2012


The ATmega328 apparently has something similar going on since the
datasheet says that the maximum external asynchronous clock frequency
is 1/4 of the CPU frequency.  That is why I suggested synchronously
clocking the CPU directly from the OCXO.  Atmel's datasheet is
annoyingly vague about some matters and I assume the capture input
works like it should.

I have also heard about many low cost ARM microcontrollers suffering
from problems similar to the one you describe.  Apparently the ones
that use an asynchronous interface between the CPU and peripherals
either have slow interfaces or suffer from some odd problems.

It is not *that* difficult to get to 10ns using a 100Mhz phase locked
clock (or even faster) in timer/counter applications using discrete
logic support but in the case of GPSDO design, I believe better
results can be obtained without so much brute force.

I am one of those weirdos who likes ECL whether integrated or
discrete.

On Thu, 6 Dec 2012 20:22:58 -0500 (EST), SAIDJACK at aol.com wrote:

>David,
> 
>The NXP LPC932 processor series are very cheap and small, and we got very  
>excited to see timers running at up to 32MHz internally if I remember  
>correctly.
> 
>Then setting up a test system we noted that the timer can capture with  
>32MHz resolution which is good enough for a low-cost GPSDO implementation, but  
>that they gated the input pin through a flip-flop running at CPU core 
>speed,  which was around 6MHz if I remember correctly.
> 
>DAAHHHH. So all that fast timer resolution goes out the door by gating the  
>input pin instead of using non-gated inputs for the timer functions.
> 
>It does work however, in the end we made that processor do the chores in  
>our quite old and discontinued FireFox GPSDO circuit. TVB has some plots  on 
>his website for that unit I think, and its quite surprising what type of  
>stability we achieved with that little 8 bit bugger back then.
> 
>bye,
>Said
> 
> 
>In a message dated 12/6/2012 16:00:27 Pacific Standard Time,  
>davidwhess at gmail.com writes:
>
>You can  use the ATmega328 16 bit timer/counter in input capture mode
>to count the  number of 10 MHz OCXO cycles per pulse per second period
>to a resolution of  100ns but there are some problems:
>
>The ATmega328 16 bit timer/counter  external clock is limited to 1/4 of
>the CPU frequency with an asynchronous  source so the 10 MHz OCXO would
>need to be divided down which would further  limit performance and
>require an external divider.  Modifying the  Aruino board to use the 10
>MHz OCXO in place of the CPU clock solves that  problem.
>
>Then operating the counter/timer in input capture mode with  the GPS
>pulse per second signal connected to the input capture pin would  allow
>almost Shera like performance.  The timing resolution would be  2.4
>times lower (and not asynchronous) limiting performance over  short
>time spans.
>
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