Pulse amplification based dynamic synchronizers with metastability measurement using capacitance de-rating

We present dynamic buffer based synchronizers where only pulses rather than stable intermediate voltages cause metastability. We exploit this unique feature by amplifying such pulses to improve MTBF by >10⁶× over jamb latches and double flip-flops at 2GHz in 65nm CMOS. The synchronizers incur single-cycle latency with a MTBF of ~2×10¹¹ years. A new method to experimentally measure metastability on chip is also proposed and used to evaluate synchronizer performance.