I don't wish to drag this out any longer ...

but if you don't wish to read data sheets before deciding which device to use, then I can't help you.



You misunderstand the intended use of these clocking resources. They are NOT meant (and can't be used for) things like recovering embedded clocks in data streams or locking to any arbitrary incoming clock. I use them to double my global clock so I can read two bytes from a buffer at the same time, and the frequency synthesis is handy for this Camera Link interface I'm working on. With all of these clock managers, you must understand that you need to tell the tools, at synthesis time, the expected input clock frequency and clock multiplication/division (if using the synthesizer and not just the DLL).

As for syncing to eight data streams with the same clock frequency and different phases: I know nothing about your application and really, maybe an FPGA is the wrong thing for your app. But maybe you SHOULD look into Virtex-4 FX or Virtex-5 LXT devices. Maybe these newer (Spartan 2 is positively ancient in FPGA terms) devices will be able to do what you need them to do. They may bust your budget and they don't have 5V tolerance.

Sure, the data sheets are a thousand pages and there's a lot you'll have to learn about before you can get your money's worth out of them.

But if it was easy, everyone would do it, right?

-a