COMMUNICATION SOLUTIONS

Clock Generator Chips Replace Crystals and Oscillators

The IDT VersaClock™ family integrates several high-performance clocks in a single device, offering cost reductions, increased reliability and more availability than high-performance crystal oscillators, alleviating their three inherent problems, reliability, availability and cost.

Designing timing schemes to meet performance requirements can be complex. In particular, designers must meet the system's requirement for frequency accuracy and stability (normally specified in ppm), duty cycle (commonly referred to as mark-space ratio) and jitter (short term, period and intrinsic jitter, etc).



Most electronic systems today use crystals and crystal oscillators to generate the required clock frequencies. The manufacture of crystal oscillators becomes more complex as performance and clock frequencies increase, the quartz must be cut into even thinner slices and complicated constructions.

IDT silicon timing solutions help engineers meet the timing requirements within their systems' specifications with only a single, low cost, crystal, allowing the engineer to select a crystal that provides the frequency accuracy and stability required. Duty cycle is usually almost 50% because the devices generally run internally at twice the clock frequency, with a divide-by-2 to generate the output frequency, and the jitter performance is excellent.

Many of IDT’s silicon timing products offer a range of programmable options to select the output frequency, skew and other parameters, increasing design flexibility and reducing the number of parts in the inventory.

Features

• Easier inventory control and procurement than with discrete crystals
• Reduced inventory
• Simplifies complex, tightly line spaced PCB layouts
• Power consumption reduced via clock throttling
• Synchronised clock outputs of different frequencies
• The output and source have the same frequency accuracy
• Configuration flexibility:
  • Function or speed changes via software or firmware upgrades
• EMI reduced by adding spread spectrum modulation
• Built-in clock switching, buffering and distribution reduces overall part count
• Programmable clock chips are available

Applications

• Anywhere discrete crystal oscillators would otherwise be needed

For further information, including a copy of the IDT White Paper, please click here