International Business Machines Corporation

Trong Duc Nguyen

Hehching Harry Li

Humberto Felipe Casal

Nandor G Thoma

Joel Roger Davidson

Campbell H Snyder

Yuan C Lo

A phase detector circuit receives both a reference clock signal and a sense clock signal and produces a synchronization signal if the sense and reference clock signals are in phase within a specified tolerance. A lead/lag signal is provided to a skew control circuit and accompanying delay circuits to increase or decrease the amount of delay on the reference clock signal and the sense clock signal if the two signals are not in phase within the specified tolerance. The sense clock signal is a feedback signal returned from logic circuitry, which originally receives the reference clock signal, which may be supplied by a master clock signal within a processor.

Three state phase detector

During power up and power down of logic circuitry implemented in CMOS, the clock signal supplied to the logic circuitry is incremented and decremented, respectively, to avoid a sudden application or removal of the clock signal to the logic circuitry.

Controlling power up using clock gating

A clocking system for complex electronic devices is created in an hierarchial manner whereby the master clock pulse is provided to a plurality of digital pulse aligners which in turn provide phase aligned clock signals at the field replaceable unit level to either a slave clock or a digital phase aligner. The slave clock or the digital phase aligner at the field replaceable unit level in turn provides an aligned clock pulse to a timing node on respective chips. A third level of the hierarchy provides similarly aligned pulses to individual using-circuits on the chips of the system. The digital phase aligner, aligning the output pulse at the timing node of the next level with the reference pulses being provided to the digital phase aligner at each level, insures that the timing pulses arriving at the utilizing circuits are synchronously aligned with clock pulses of the master clock. The system provides dramatic simplification of replacement of either field replaceable units or individual components within field replaceable units. The system is self-phasing and self-correcting to accommodate timing misalignments caused by any variations in the timing delays at all levels, thereby reducing the jitter that must be accommodated.

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Webster, TX, United States of America

Trong Duc Nguyen