Electronic – Altera MAX10 Clock primitives without synchronization

fpgamax10

Irrespective of the relative evil of gating clocks in FPGAs my understanding was that one should synchronize the enable signal to the clock being gated by means of a flip-flop chain.

However, while studying the documentation for the MAX10 device I stumbled over the following section: Clock Enable Signals where the figures 5 and 6 seem to indicate that no synchronization seems to be necessary.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Do I miss something?

Best Answer

This only applies to "signals when switching the clock source to the PLLs or GCL". So if you want to switch a clock to a PLL then you can do so by disabling one clock and enabling another. The PLL functions like a clock buffer to some extent. However downstream from the PLL the clock should not be ran through logic because it will provide a mismatch of timing.