1. Home
  2. Electronics Down Under
  3. Asynchronous vs Synchronous (74HC165/74HC166)

Asynchronous vs Synchronous (74HC165/74HC166)

Hi there guys,

I have a absolute shaft encoder for position sensing.

It's the EAW version:

formatting link

I'm fast running out of I/O on my micro and can't spare 8 pins - so this means I need to do something smart to lower my pin counts.

Been looking at the 74HC165 and 74HC166 which are 8 bit parallel-in/serial-out shift register.

The difference between them is that:

165 is asynchronous 166 is synchronous

What I want to do is:

  1. get the 8 bit data from the encoder
  2. send it to the micro
  3. during the sending, the encoder data could change, but I want it ignored until all the data is sent.
  4. when sending has completed, new data is then latched into the register again and the process is repeated.

So my question is, what's the difference between the 165 and 166 and more importantly, which one will do what I described above?

My program algorithm would read:

  1. latch the register to get the 8 bit data from the encoder
  2. enable serial reading on the 74HC16X
  3. pulse clock (rising edge)
  4. read serial data
  5. goto step 3 until all 8 bit has been read
  6. disable serial reading 74HC16X
  7. convert serial data to something useful for my application
  8. repeat the process again.

Hope that make sense guys. Appreciate any help on deciding which register I should use (165 or 166)??!!

Cheers

Reply to
kd
Loading thread data ...

For your application it doesn't really matter. The "Synchronous" device will only load during a clock transition (when PL is enabled), useful when you cascade devices and want to sync serial data for example. You don't need this. The "asynchronous" device will load any time the PL input pin transitions, this is all you need. So all you need do is toggle the PL pin to latch the data and then shift with the clock input. 3 lines required, PL/CLK/DATA. Input changes will be ignored durign shifting while PL is high.

The 165.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Thanks Dave (again)... easy peasy, lemon squeezy ;-)

Reply to
kd

Yes, easy peasy, but I forgot to mention... Because you are sampling asynchronous data, there may be times when your input changes while you are latching the data. In this case you may get garbled data.

Your inputs must stay stable and meet the "setup time" and "hold time" of the chip (probably around 10ns or so, the datasheet will tell you) while it is being latched. This is not unique to the 165/166 it is the same for any latch, even if you feed the inputs straight into the micro. Just be wary that this could happen. If you see any "weird" data, this is what it could be. The usual fix for this in software is to just ensure that you read say two or three samples the same one after the other before you register that data as being ok.

Before you ask, no, you can't use the "synchronous" 166 to fix this problem :->

If you want to find out mroe about this, look for "metastability".

Regards Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.