Source-Synchronous clocking refers to a technique used for timing symbols on a digital interface. Specifically, it refers to the technique of having the transmitting device send a clock signal along with the data signals. The timing of the unidirectional data signals is referenced to the clock (often called the strobe) sourced by the same device that generates those signals, and not to a global clock (i.e. generated by a bus master). Compared to other digital clocking topologies like system-synchronous clocks, where a global clock source is fed to all devices in the system, a source-synchronous clock topology can attain far higher speeds.

This type of clocking is common in high-speed interfaces between micro-chips, including DDR SDRAM, SGI XIO interface, Intel Front Side Bus for the x86 and Itanium processors, HyperTransport, SPI-4.2 and many others.