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RE: Baloney

I am sure you are smart enough to solve the problem (of transport independence) if you put your mind to it. But you might have to junk your systems architecture, since you ultimately derive clock from the transport. This is not necessary or desirable in a high quality DAC and I was shocked that you had adopted this architecture. Your entire DAC could perfectly well be implemented as a single clock domain given a suitable clock architecture. There would be no need for any synchronizers anywhere in your box. They could all be moved into the computer sound card where they would be safely away from sensitive analog circuitry.

The metastability issue is a red herring. Competent computer designers have understood the problem since around 1970, when Alan Kotok first described the problems he encountered designing the KI10 processor. (I worked down the hall from him and used to go into his office to use his computer terminal on occasion, which is why I became aware of the issue at that time. There was even a conference on the subject which he attended.) Of course there have been no shortage of snake oil peddlers and even text book authors who couldn't get a grip on a problem that was, on the one hand, completely impossible to solve to perfection while on the other hand, quite simple to solve in practice. Carver Mead has a good chapter on the subject in his "Introduction to VLSI design". The more philosophically inclined can read Leslie Lamport's paper on the subject, link attached.

Your reply confirms my earlier comment about designers. They aren't going to solve the problem if they make excuses rather than get on with finding solutions. Now that you have been humbled by discovering that your design wasn't transport independent like you had hoped, perhaps you will go back and figure out where you went wrong. Since you are retired and doing this work for fun, you are not subject to commercial pressures.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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