Separating CLK or DATA for individual HV5530's will, as you said, accomplish the same result. Separating LE is another option but you have to be careful to keep-track of what has been shifted. It's not obvious from the diagrams I posted, but I actually have 4 serial data signals on the ribbon-cable, and I jumper a separate serial-data signal on each board (which limits my design to 4 boards or 24 digits with a single ribbon cable).
It's entirely possible to construct a single serial shift-chain, but you have to be careful about timing between cascaded HV5530's. According to the datasheet, the data hold-time is 10nsec. The min prop-delay of the 5530 is not specified, so you have to assume it's zero. In order to guarantee hold-time margin, the following equation applies: Hold-margin = MinPropDelay - ClkSkew - MinHoldTime. In this case, even if you have zero CLK skew, you still have a 10nsec violation on the hold-time. Now, with real silicon the MinPropDelay is finite, and I *suspect* it's more than 10nsec, but I'm not going to risk it. In my case, I created a second clock signal and I can guarantee hold-time margin through the sequencing of the signals from my FPGA. Clock skew has a lot of subtleties. Yes, it's largely due to the board-trace flight-times, but it's also due to finite risetime of the clk signal itself and when each HV5530 determines the CLK is high or low. This will vary from device to device, and the effect is worsened with slow rise/fall times. Logic-level translators are quite slow, with delays in 100's of nsec; I took no chances and used separate clks. I could have used an inverter to create the second CLK phase, but that was adding another IC and I already had a spare pin on the FPGA. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/71ab7481-17a7-41ba-ad49-3176db378f42%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
