Don't overthink it too much folks. When in doubt, go build it, plug it in and see what happens.
On this:
Lex wrote on Jan 31st, 2012, 1:04am:There is one thing I would like to share though: suppose you have a large chain of inverters. If you create a pulse somewhere in the chain, that is just long enough to flip the inverter, then you will see that your pulse will live on for some periods.
I wonder if you would have a chain (of even inverters) that is very long, would the oscillation last very long (or maybe indefinitely) if you kickstart it properly?
What you are describing here is something that has been dealt with in the area of ring oscillators in PLL's when used in a high radiation environment, and receive an ion hit.
One inverter in the ring flips over and sends a pulse propagating around the ring.
I am very familiar with this, having dealt with it for a satellite PLL IC I did a while back.
What happens?
Well, two different things.
In a simulation, the pulse can propagate forever around the loop if you model a fairly ideal system.
In the real world, the pulse has some randomness in propagation and delay and it will eventually die out.
You can even introduce that slow die out of the pulse into simulation if you start introducing some noise and variance in the propagation delays into the system.
Which if you think about it, when you power up a ring oscillator some random glitches like that exist as part of the power up process.