This is to poke my head in, and to share a simple multichannel phase comparator/monitor that turned out to be useful.
I have a few homebuilt boxes that will do ~100ps timestamps, I have other uses for them, and tying them up with a single long term experiment is unacceptable. So I needed a phase comparator that I could rebuild in an hour if I wanted to, something in the spirit of TVB's PIC16 divider. Something simple. The idea is this: Beat a number of 10MHz inputs against another clock frequency using the input flipflops in a microcontroller as samplers, sample a number of times to cover the phase circle, and calculate the phase. Beating against 11.0592MHz gives a period of 3456 clocks, sampling every 8 clocks gives 432 samples, that should give 230ps resolution. Add clock jitter and aperture jitter, and precision should be around 500ps. How much performance can one get for $10? schematic: http://n1.taur.dk/timenuts/phasecomp8.pdf samples: http://n1.taur.dk/timenuts/phasesamples.png When comparing a 10MHz source with itself through a cable delay, the peak noise is 400ps. That's for a 300-microsecond acquisition time, which means the update rate is limited by how fast I can compute the vector and shovel data over to a PC. When monitoring beating 10MHz sources with an adjusted (-3ppm) microcontroller clock, it's about 600ps peak. When misadjusted to be -30 ppm off, it's 1.1ns peak. At the moment there is only a crude windows program for turning the output into decimal plottable data, so some programming skill or beer drinking friend with programming skill is required, as well as knowledge of what one wants to measure (that's usually the hard part). source, hex: http://n1.taur.dk/timenuts/phasecomp.zip converter: http://n1.taur.dk/timenuts/phasehex2dec_win.zip I'm aware that 600ps is a very large figure in a lot of cases but for my oscillators it's good enough. /Kasper Pedersen. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.