Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Puzzle: Divide by 3 Counter with 50% DC

It is pretty simple to make a clock divider with odd frequency division (let's say 3 or 5). But it doesn't have 50% duty cycle. Some modifications are essential to achieve that 50% duty cycle. You might argue, why so much fuss about 50%? To give you an insight into it, consider the following divided waveform with 66% DC:

As you can note from the above waveforms: 
  • NEG-TO-POS arc (i.e. any path launching from a negative edge triggered flop and being captured at positive edge triggered flop) would have least time to meet the setup time requirement and hence can be critical. 
  • On the other hand, POS-TO-POS and NEG-TO-NEG are so much relaxed. 
Same would be true for a divider with 33% duty cycle as well. So, it is preferable to use a divided clock with 50% duty cycle.
Can you design such a circuit which takes a clock signal of frequency f, and outputs another clock signal of frequency f/3 with 50% duty cycle?

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