Clock management in a Gigabit Ethernet physical layer transceiver circuit

Abstract

This paper describes the clock management of a mixed signal, high-speed, multi-clock, fully synchronous circuit. The MA1111A13 circuit clock distribution is a complicated structure that seamlessly incorporates different well-known techniques for power reduction, asynchronous clock domains inter-operability, and compatibility with different IO timing standards and data rates. This complex clocking scheme has been successfully integrated into the standard semi-custom physical design flow. The physical implementation of the clock network with synopsys astro is also presented.