Clock Performance, Reliability and Cost Interrelationships

Martin W. Levine

Abstract:	Clock manufacturers have encountered major difficulties in attempting to supply reasonably-priced, reliable clocks for critical aerospace applications. The basic problems arise from the inherent technical difficulties of designing and fabricating equipment to provide performance at the limits of the state-of-the-art in demanding environments, but the difficulties are compounded by inconsistent and unstandardized specification practices, and by an emphasis on initial acquisition costs, rather than on life-cycle-costs. Conventional parts-stress analyses, which do not provide a useful indication of the reliability of a clock, lead to increased parts costs for high-performance aerospace clocks without commensurate benefits in improved reliability or performance. The characterization of clocks in term of the mean-time-between-resynchronizations, facilitates the estimation of life-cycle costs and provides a means to evaluate clocks in a realistic fashion for specific systems applications.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 11th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting November 27 - 29, 1979 Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland
Pages:	643 - 655
Cite this article:	Levine, Martin W., "Clock Performance, Reliability and Cost Interrelationships," Proceedings of the 11th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting, Greenbelt, Maryland, November 1979, pp. 643-655.
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