Patent ID: 8886987

Claim:
A data processing unit, comprising: a time information provider including, a first sampling unit configured to sample a clock-or-strobe signal, a first bit history unit, coupled to the first sampling unit, and configured to temporarily store a sequence of samples of the clock-or-strobe signal, and a transition detection unit, coupled to the first bit history unit, and configured to detect a transition in the sequence of samples to acquire a digitized clock-or-strobe time information on the basis of the sequence of samples of the clock-or-strobe signal; and at least one data extraction unit, coupled to the time information provider, including, a second sampling unit configured to sample a data signal to acquire data samples of the data signal, a second bit history unit, coupled to the second sampling unit, and configured to temporarily store a sequence of the data samples of the data signal, and a data selection unit, coupled to the second bit history unit, and configured to select data from the temporarily stored sequence of the data samples of the data signal depending on the digitized clock-or-strobe time information provided by the transition detection unit; wherein the clock-or-strobe signal is physically different from the data signal; wherein the time information provider comprises a time-to-digital converter configured provide, as the digitized clock-or-strobe time information, a digitized time stamp describing a time of a transition of the clock-or-strobe signal, and wherein the digitized clock or strobe time information is represented as a multi-bit value encoding the clock or strobe time information or wherein the digitized clock-or-strobe time information is represented as an increment-decrement-information, wherein the increment-decrement-information describes a difference between a timing of a currently detected transition of the clock-or-strobe signal and a timing of a previous transition of the clock-or-strobe signal.