Clock recovery

Serial data is normally sent as a series of pulses with well-defined timing constraints. This presents a problem for the receiving side; if their own local clock is not precisely synchronized with the transmitter, they may sample the signal at the wrong time and thereby decode the signal incorrectly. This can be addressed with extremely accurate and stable clocks, like atomic clocks, but these are expensive and complex. More common low-cost clock systems, like quartz oscillators, are accurate enough for this task over short periods of time, but over a period of minutes or hours the drift in these systems will make timing too inaccurate for most tasks.

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