The Digital Revolution, also for Time Scales

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a digital approach to composite clock generation for time scales, demonstrating advantages over traditional analog methods in reliability, performance, and cost through a practical implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a digital method for composite clock generation that processes clock information directly, improving various operational aspects over analog techniques.

Findings

Digital approach enhances reliability and performance.

Significant reductions in size, power, and cost.

Successful implementation with state-of-the-art clocks.

Abstract

This work focuses on the generation of a composite clock for time scales and shows the advantages of a more recent digital approach with respect to a traditional analog one. A digital approach directly processes the information contained into the clock sinusoids, instead of the sinusoids themselves and leads to significant advantages in terms of reliability, performance, complexity, flexibility, size, power consumption and cost. A practical example based on a new digital instrument is provided to show how it is possible to combine state-of-the-art clocks from the Oscillator Imp platform at FEMTO-ST and FEMTO Engineering (Besan\c{c}on, France).