Clock Cycle (also known as clock period, clock tick, or simply a tick or a cycle) is the minimum time unit required to perform all the most basic operations in a synchronous circuit such as a value transfer between two buffers. The length of a single clock cycle is the time required for one complete clock pulse. It is the reciprocal of the clock speed.

Overview

The clock cycle is a fundamental part of all synchronous circuits which must accommodate the time taken for the longest critical path for all possible states in a circuit. In other words, it's usually the sum of all the wire and switching delay for the longest indivisible portion of the circuit. The clock cycle is usually a constant value, although various power management mechanisms can modulate it to achieve better performance and efficiency attributes.

The clock cycle is the reciprocal of the clock speed.

For example, a microprocessor operating at 1 GHz has a clock cycle of 1 ns.

Relation to execution time

Main article: runtime

Thus, the length of time it takes to execute serialized code is directly related to the length of a clock cycle (or clock speed).

See also

• clock speed
• synchronous circuits
• critical path
• performance

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