Constraining data to out-of-phase clocks

To make sure I understand your issue, you want to *measure* the phase of the clock the 1 pps is detected on to 1/8th the resolution of the 100 MHz clock itself? If you are not trying to measure that phase relationship, I'm not sure why you would want to use 8 phases.

You can use the FFs in the I/O blocks to capture a true and inverted clocked version of the signal on that pin. Each of four pins can receive the same signal and be clocked by differently phased clocks. I don't know how much differential timing you will see between the four clocks as well as the true/inverted clocked FFs.

Another way to do this is to use a SERDES which PLLs the clock up in frequency. But I don't think this lets you correlate the data received to the main clock in an absolute way.

Otherwise I think you may need to do the sampling in external logic and read the thermometer code in parallel.

A friend did something like this where he used a digital delay line that I think he delay locked to the 1 PPS so he was on the edge of detecting the 1 PPS on the same clock each cycle. I don't recall this for sure, but it was something like this. His circuit was generating a 1 PPS for an new atomic clock at the Naval Observatory. It sync'ed up to the existing 1 PPS for a while to find the right phase, then locked and ran. Sounds like what you are doing.

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Rick C

There's not enough foreshadowing for me to figure out where the thermometer comes in.

But I have lots of questions!

How precisely do you really need to know the 1PPS?

How can you know that the phase alignment is static, yet not know what it is? The only way I can think of that you'd have a static phase alignment is if there's a PLL locking to the 1PPS, and that implies a known phase alignment.

Why not use a 100MHz clock that _is_ of known phase alignment? Seems to me that an VCXO plus some logic (possibly inside the FPGA) plus an op-amp with an integrator would add up to phase lock.

Certainly if you're using a free-running oscillator, even a crystal one, your phase will, at best, be drifting all over the place, and it'll probably have enough of an offset to it that it'll be running away rather than exhibiting a random walk.

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

I can answer that, the 100 MHz and 1 PPS are from two different, but both very stable sources... most likely. I expect this is like the circuit my friend designed, a 1 PPS generator, or at least an internal alignment to the external 1 PPS, but clocked from the local 100 MHz clock. You would figure at any given time the phase relationship is stable, but not known apriori. With a clock stability of 10^-... pick a number, the phase would not change very fast.

1 PPS from GPS, I expect clocked into the FPGA by a local atomic clock.

How about rubidium or cesium? I think they get better than 10^-12, maybe 10^-15.

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Rick C

The 1PPS signals out of the GPS receivers that I have seen, advertise

50nS accuracy. Your 100MHz clock has a period of 10nS. From what I understand of your project, I would just put the 1PPS signal in through a couple of sync FF's and then compensate for an assumed delay of 2 clock cycles in the application of the sync'ed 1PPS signal downstream.

The phase relationship between the 1PPS input and the local 100MHz clock won't be all that static unless you phase lock the 100MHz clock to the

1PPS. Even an exotic local oscillator is going to drift around with time and temperature compared to the 1PPS.

Bobh

Now that I have read JL's post, I understand. You have two signals provided by your customer and not enough information to know how they are related or how to use them. This will all depend on what you need to use the signals for. In other words, you have not provided enough info for us to know how to design your system.

So how are you going to use these two signals? What are the requirements you need to meet?

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Rick C

You know how sometimes when you get started on a project, and you get some assumptions so firmly in your head that you don't even realize that they're just assumptions? I had a substantially better opinion of the jitter on the 1 PPS than is actually warranted. There are a _COUPLE_ of receivers out there with 1 PPS jitter down to 10 ns (RMS), but for the most part you're entirely correct. And even at 10, there's no static relationship against a PLL-locked 100 MHz; it's just every pulse for itself.

You'd think with as many times as I've learned that lesson, one of these times it would stick.

Now that's a question I have no idea how to resolve. Is the exotic LO (let's assume cesium for fun) drifting and the PPS stable, or is it (I'd guess) that no matter how stable the LO that the PPS is walking around?

Making claims of objective truth on these timescales is hard.

--
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
 
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.

Exactly, and so it's not, as both you and Tim mentioned, about "measuring" the phase of the PPS signal per se. It's about being able to clock it in, either by delaying the PPS or rotating the clock, in such a way that you've guaranteed you're not sampling the PPS during the maybe/maybenot interval. If you did you'd get a one clock ambiguity in the sampling which would becomes period jitter. Always be early, or always be late, but don't keep changing your mind.

Though as BobH pointed out, it's not quite so simple as that, either, since the PPS reference from any purchasable source has tens of nanoseconds of peak-to-peak period jitter. So my assumptions of phase stability are blown, and it's back to the customer, bucket o' questions in hand, to find out whether I'm supposed to faithfully replicate the PPS or jitter clean it. So this question, while still interesting, becomes moot for my actual application.

I hadn't even realized JL put it out to s.e.d. Generally I stay off his groups and he off of mine, thus allowing both of us to maintain a careful mystique of omniscience by sneaking off and asking folks on the Internet.

--
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
 
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.

It is still unclear to me what you wish to use the 1 PPS for exactly. But if you require a 1 PPS which is locked to a 100 MHz, both of which can be connected to the GPS signals, you would need to generate both yourself. In another thread John has indicated he doesn't want to wait for the synthesized 1 PPS to sync up to the GPS 1 PPS, but I don't see where you have a choice if you really need the two signals locked in the way you seem to want.

The issue is not a design issue really. It is fundamental to the fact that the 1 PPS from the GPS has significant jitter.

As I've said before, I know someone who designed exactly this circuit for one of the Naval Observatory's newer atomic clocks. I can put you in touch if you would like. His design also has a time of day clock display in case you need the time. lol

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Rick C

I'm pretty sure that it would be the 1PPS walking around, but walking around with an average error of zero, or at least zero somewhere inside the receiver, with a fixed offset to the spigot on the box, and another fixed offset from that spigot to your chip. So your "objective truth" is that the average time error is zero, or at least some knowable, calibrateable constant.

GPS gets a message from each of a bunch of satellites that basically add up to "this is what time it is and this is where I am". If the GPS receiver knew what time it was, it could take three such messages and determine where it is (because there are three spatial dimensions, so it needs three equations to solve for three unknowns). But the GPS receiver doesn't know what time it is, so it has to solve for time, too.

So a GPS receiver is either going to smooth the 1PPS itself, thereby running the chance of making it worse, and requiring it to have a pretty good time base, or it's going to not smooth the 1PPS, and instead just use the most recent GPS time/position solution to decide when to pop off the 1PPS pulse. If it doesn't smooth the 1PPS, then you can expect a time error that's commensurate with the usual GPS position error of 10 meters or so (100 meters if the defense department decides to turn selective availability on, and no guarantees that in time of war they won't). 10 meters works out to 30ns, so...

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

And we ratted you out. Sorry.

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

C'est la vie. Honestly, once you've been seen to lose track of 4U rackmount equipment in your own office, the mystique fades a bit.

--
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
 
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.

Certainly you are a lot more pleasant to discuss things with.

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Rick C

I don't know for sure, but I find it hard to believe they would output the 1 PPS based solely on one measurement each. While the 10 meter may often constrain the accuracy of any one calculation, it is probabilistic and can have a much larger actual error for a short amount of time. While they may not be doing something equivalent to a PLL for the time, I expect they are at least using some form of weighted average for calculating the 1 PPS signal.

I had a GPS that would receive the signals ok in my house and connected it to a utility that would map the location over time on an XY display. I saw it walk off the property maybe once per day and come back within a minute or less. That would be more like 50 meters. I've heard of shipwrecks due to a loss of accuracy caused by poor constellations. That has to be a lot more than 50 meters.

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Rick C

There are some crowded harbors where the margin of error is less than that. My master's thesis was building a data-link receiver for the US Coast Guard's then-experimental differential GPS service*. At the time selective availability was sometimes on ("SA" -- they turned it on for Gulf War #1, AFAIK), and with SA on you could only get a 90% CEP of 100 meters. With differential GPS you could get it down to less than 10m.

I don't know if it's done, but when I was in grad school (and paying attention, thanks to my prof) they were also talking about using pseudolites, which are basically low-powered GPS satellites sitting on the ground, doing what GPS satellites do. They augment the constellation in places where it Really Matters (like narrow harbor mouths). A minute of web research tells me that they're out there, but not whether they're in common use.

• Everyone sees that and thinks I'm a microwave designer. No. The data link was operating at their radiobeacon frequencies, around 300kHz. It's a different world altogether, with entirely different propagation and even noise characteristics than microwaves. It did, however, give me an early appreciation for the fact that all the nice theory you're taught is based on whatever you can do when the math is easy, not necessarily what happens when you start from real-world phenomenon and try to work things out from there.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
http://www.wescottdesign.com 

I'm looking for work -- see my website!

I expect that the 1PPS out of the GPS receiver will be based on some high frequency clock, My suspicion is that it is a 20MHz clock, hence the 50nS jitter.

My guess is that both clocks are going to wander with respect to each other, and if you use the simple 2 sync FF's you might get better results if they do wander. If the clocks are almost synchronous, you will get times when the input will fail to meet the setup for significant durations and may get missed clock edges in bunches, where if the clocks were not too close, you would only get an occasional missed clock edge. This is speculation on my part though.

For Sure! Everything about GPS is handled statistically though, so it just defines a probable window for it.

Good Luck, BobH

The fancy GPS "Timing Receivers" allow you to lock the position value to a surveyed value (or a few day average of the position) and then you get a more accurate time calculation with fewer sats.

Unless you are in a deep urban canyon or a real canyon, 4 sats should be pretty easy to see for a full 3D fix with time. More sats lets the receiver software pick and choose which ones to use for the lowest residual error on the calculations.

BobH

It's not just how many sats, but where they are. Best if they are not close together but rather spread around most of the sky.

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Rick C

True. That is why elevation accuracy is the worst axis. It is really hard to get a signal from a satellite below you!

BobH

At least one of the data sheets implied exactly that. I could see having a philosophy of "do our best from moment to moment, and let the customer make _their_ best from that". As a sometime-customer of places that want to give me highly-cooked data, I can even appreciate the sentiment.

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com