Microchip’s ZL4029x family are high-performance ultra-low jitter low power one to 20 high-speed current steering logic (HCSL) fanout buffers. The ZL40292 and ZL40294 are fully compliant to the DB2000Q and DB2000QL standards, while the ZL40293 and ZL40295 can be used in PCIe Gen 1, 2, 3, and 4 specifications. Each buffer is an ideal complement to chipsets where distributed clocks are required across several peripheral components, such as central processing units (CPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and physical layers (PHYs) in data center servers and storage devices, along with many other PCIe applications. The devices’ low additive jitter of approximately 20 femtoseconds (fs) far exceeds the DB2000Q/QL specification of 80 fs. This provides designers large margins to meet tight timing budgets while achieving increasing data rates. These devices will minimize jitter in distributing clocks with up to 20 outputs, thereby maintaining the integrity and quality of the clock signal through the buffer.

The buffers achieve low-power dissipation and contribute significant savings to power budgets by using low-power high-speed current steering logic (LP-HCSL). Compared to standard HCSL, LP-HCSL consumes one-third of the power leading to a significant decrease in power consumption. This feature also gives customers the ability to drive longer traces on boards, which improves signal routing while reducing components and board space. The ZL40292 can eliminate up to 80 termination resistors (four per output) compared to traditional HCSL buffers. The rich feature set of these devices make them suitable for clock distribution, Intel QPI servers, storage and data centers, and PCI Express applications.