Ask Electronics

I’m working on driving a very finicky lcd. I have it working now with an FPGA dev kit. I had to use an FPGA because some of the timing requirements are in the tens of nanoseconds.

At the end of the day, I wrote a block for a one shot/continuous clock with a programmable duty cycle and initial delay. This block was repeated six times for the various clocks with their specific values.

Moving to the final product, this feels like overkill. In the past, I’ve managed to make this kind of thing work with a Rube Goldberg collection of on-board timer/counters on the microcontroller.

I’d like to avoid that mess this time around. If I can generate the clocks externally, I can have the host MCU send the data quickly using DMA.

An FPGA works great, but they’re expensive and there’s the issue of licensing for FPGA and and CPLD software.

I’ve seen this problem solved with a lookup table, but there aren’t a lot of cheap/small rom/ram options for what I’m trying to do.

Basically, what I’m asking is is there a component that can be easily programmed to generate a number of clocks, doesn’t need any costly software licensing, and comes in a very small package? (Like wlcsp)