Complicated clocking in an FPGA.

Hi, there:

I have ASIC source codes from a previous communication chip. It has some 23
clocks,
many of them are derived from a 144MHz clock (72/36/24/18/.../2/1MHz), only
three from
other sources. The ASIC codes made use of a clock generator with clock
gating...

How am I going to handle all these different clocks? In a Vertex chip, there
is only 16 clock buffers.

May I use a "always @ posedge clk144mhz clk72mhz <= ~clk72mhz " to generate
a 72mhz while
use same global buffer as 144mhz?

Best Regards,
Kelvin

Use only the 144 MHz clock and maybe the 72 MHz.  if the others are
necessary because you cant "guess" the correct position of the edge, then
use a double flip flop and an xor to generate internal clock enables for all
the rest (just treat them as inputs.)

A simple state machine could also be used to monitor the other clocks and
generate the same clocks internally to the FPGA so that they are always in
the correct phase.

You can do the same with the clock sources but remember monostability (add a
third flip flop in front of the two).

Simon


"A Day & A Knight" <kelvin8157@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bt7sbj$5kh$1@mawar.singnet.com.sg...
> Hi, there:
>
> I have ASIC source codes from a previous communication chip. It has some
23
> clocks,
> many of them are derived from a 144MHz clock (72/36/24/18/.../2/1MHz),
only
> three from
> other sources. The ASIC codes made use of a clock generator with clock
> gating...
>
> How am I going to handle all these different clocks? In a Vertex chip,
there
> is only 16 clock buffers.
>
> May I use a "always @ posedge clk144mhz clk72mhz <= ~clk72mhz " to
generate
> a 72mhz while
> use same global buffer as 144mhz?
>
> Best Regards,
> Kelvin
>
>
>

> How am I going to handle all these different clocks? In a Vertex chip,
there
> is only 16 clock buffers.

I don't know how practical this is in your situation, but you could drive
all your registers off of the 144 MHz and then use the appropriate clock
enables.  To do this, you can create a Perl script that will go through the
code and automatically insert enable code where needed.  How hard this will
be depends on the quality of the code you've inherited.

If you manage to do that, then you're done with the easy part.  The hard
part will be verifying that you didn't break anything.  Unfortunately it's
doubtful extensive test code came along with the source code, so you will
have to do it yourself.

If you don't like the idea of that, I suppose you could keep all your 23
clocks, and use regular routing resources for the least used clocks.  Then
throw in aggressive MAXSKEW timing constraints to try and manage it all.  I
have never tried this, but I think you'd get more headache and stress with
this option.  A harder time routing, and perhaps tough to track down timing
bugs.

Well hopefully someone will come up with an easier solution.  Best of luck.