Patent ID: 7437588

Claim:
A system for synchronizing circuit cards, comprising: a chassis having a standardized specification, the chassis including specification-compliant slots and a backplane for providing electrical connections between circuit cards coupled to the slots; a specification-compliant star trigger card couplable to one of the slots for providing a reference clock and a Least Common Multiple (LCM) signal to other specification-compliant circuit cards coupled to other slots in the chassis over specification-compliant matched-length reference clock traces and a bus on the backplane that is user-configurable according to the specification, respectively; and one or more specification-compliant circuit cards couplable to slots in the chassis for receiving the reference clock and the LCM signal at about the same time and generating one or more high frequency clocks having like edges synchronized with like edges on the reference clock and the LCM signal; wherein the LCM signal is a least common multiple of the reference clock and the one or more high frequency clocks.