Monday, September 28, 2015

What is clock uncertainty?

In ideal mode the clock signal can arrive at all clock pins simultaneously. But in fact, that perfection is not acheievable. So, to anticipate the fact that the clock will arrive at different times at different clock pins, the  "ideal mode" clock assumes a clock uncertainty.
For example, a 1 ns clock with a 100 ps clock uncertainty means that the next clock tick will arrive in 1 ns plus or minus 50 ps.

A deeper question gets into "why" the clock does not always arrive exactly one clock period later.
There are several possible reasons but I will list 3 major ones:

a) The insertion delay to the launching flip-flop's clock pin is different than the insertion delay to the capturing flip-flop's clock pin ( one paths through th clock tree can be longer than another path).
The is called clock skew.

b)The clock period is not constant. Some clock cycles are loner or shorter than others in a random fashion. This is called clock jitter.

c) Even if the launching clock path and the capturing clock path are absolutely identical,
their path delays can still be different because of on-chip variation. This where the chip's delay properties vary the die due to process variations or temperature variations or other reasons.
This essentially increases the clock skew.


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