US Patent 7642767 Method and apparatus for measuring duty cycle

Disclosed herein is a method and apparatus used to the measure duty cycle of a clocking waveform utilizing minimal hardware and achieving high accuracy. This invention utilizes digital sampling of the signal to be measured at a rate that can be significantly lower then the clocking frequency of the signal to be measured. It accomplishes broad-band, multi-frequency use by using a time-varying frequency for the sampling clock to make sure that the sampling clock is asynchronous with the frequency of the clocking signal to be measured. The average ratio of the sampled ones (or zeros) as compared to the total number of samples is then computed to derive the measurement of duty cycle.