> This reminds me of (tongue fully in cheek), a scheme put forth by
> a cohort of mine for distributing clock in digital systems
> without suffering the ill effects of propagation delay. Simply drive
> a 1/2 wavelength line at one extreme end with a sinusoid. In the steady
> state, at any instant in time, all points on the line would be of
> the same polarity - but with differing amplitudes. At any point along
> the line where clock is needed, attach a high-Z, wide dynamic range,
> zero crossing detector (ZCD) at the end of a zero length stub. If all
> ZCDs have equal propagation delay, then all will derive an identically
> time matched replica of the clock. An added bonus is the steady state
> driver power dissipation, which would be 0;-)
>
> Time to get back to real products,
Well, you *thought* it was all in jest. Actually, resonant clocking
schemes have occasionally been used. The lovely thing about them is
that they are insensitive to driver output impedance (in addition to
the very low power dissipation.)
For embedded systems with fixed clock frequencies they actually make
a lot of sense, although unlike your proposal the most common styles
are variations on point-to-point or star distributions.
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