Digital logic folks: I've been seeing a lot of 4/8-bit computer projects using TTL logic. From my limited FPGA experience I know that meeting timing is critical for a functioning design, yet on these simple projects, nobody seems to talk about this.
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These designs are all fairly low freq, so is it a non-issue because the propagation delay through the wires is much faster than the delay through the digital logic? Can a design like this be routed such that these constraints are violated? At what frequency is this even relevant?
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I guess a case that I would have assumed may be problematic is routing a clock signal to a "far" away (a breadboard or two) register, where some output from another register to that register takes a short path (through a gate or two) before reaching the input.
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I guess one thing I could do to figure this out myself is check out TTL register setup/hold timings and find some propagation speeds for typical wires or whatever and do some basic calculations on some simple circuit models, but it would be cool if someone could clarify this. :)
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Maybe
@ben_eater,@eevblog,@benheck would know :)3 replies 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
Replying to @ferristweetsnow @ben_eater and
/cc
@marcan42 for FPGA wizardry1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @gsuberland @ferristweetsnow and
The answer is yes, it matters just like on an FPGA, and you can certainly get into sticky situations with setup/hold times. But as long as all your logic is the same type it should work well together in the slow case, and then it's just a matter of how high you can clock.
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Replying to @marcan42 @gsuberland and
Discrete logic designs are rarely run at anywhere past a MHz or two, while FPGA designs are often pushing 100MHz. It's also much harder to simulate a physical circuit to come up with a theoretical timing model, because you don't know things like wire capacitance.
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Replying to @marcan42 @gsuberland and
On an FPGA the physical layout is fairly uniform and you can derive a "safe" timing model that is consistent (in practice you can often go much faster than the timing report says, but no guarantees). With breadboard designs, well, just try and see.
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Even at slow clocks though, you can definitely have timing and signal integrity problems. For example, bad clock routing can cause ringing/reflections and double-clocking of logic. In general mixing fast and slow logic can be a bad idea.
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Replying to @marcan42 @gsuberland and
If you use fast logic then it's going to have fast rise/fall times, and that higher dV/dt can cause problems with clocks or clock-like signals if the signal integrity is not up to par. Slower buffers can mitigate this at the expense of being, well, slower.
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Replying to @marcan42 @gsuberland and
Of course you can mitigate this with things like well placed resistors to limit current and thus rise times; sometimes adding capacitance helps too.
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