Products > Test Equipment

Frequency reference clocks should ..

(1/5) > >>

BillyO:
.. be:

A) Sine wave
B) Square wave
C) It depends
D) Should not really matter

colorado.rob:
A "square wave" is an imaginary construct. If you think you need a square wave, you first need to specify maximum rise time. It is a sum of some limited number of sine waves.

A square wave is the EE equivalent of the physicist's "perfectly spherical cow".

nctnico:
Square wave is better due to faster edges which cause less jitter. OTOH this could lead to reflections which distort the signal in poorly terminated cables (which is the case in many setups I've seen). The industry standard is sine wave.

TimFox:
Many pieces of test equipment send the external reference input through a bandpass filter before further processing.

BillyO:

--- Quote from: colorado.rob on January 26, 2023, 06:12:51 pm ---A "square wave" is an imaginary construct. If you think you need a square wave, you first need to specify maximum rise time. It is a sum of some limited number of sine waves.

A square wave is the EE equivalent of the physicist's "perfectly spherical cow".

--- End quote ---
Close, but you got it bit backwards.  Being a physicist myself I'd have to say the "ideal square wave" is more akin to the "ideal cow" (whatever that would be). and the "spherical cow" approximation is more akin to the achievable real-world approximation of an "ideal square wave"  :-DD

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page