Hello everyone,
I was wondering what the standard design practice is for turning off the clock for some parts of an FPGA design while keeping other parts running. I would assume simply gating the clock (followed by a global clock buffer) introduces unacceptable amounts of clock skew. Perhaps this method could be combined with use of a delay-locked loop as present in the Xilinx FPGAs to keep the gated clock synchronous to the rest of the system? Of course the gating circuit would also have to take care of switching the gated clock glitchless, for which perhaps a circuit could be used such as the one on
A similar problem exists when instead of turning the clock off it is switched to a divided version (produced by counter) of itself, while other parts keep running at the full speed or a different division factor.
I would prefer to keep the whole system synchronous (e.g. all switched or divided versions of the same clock with minimal skew) because else the different parts would need anti-metastability sychronizers such as
2 or 3 flipflops in series on all their communication lines...greetings, Tom