logicsignal-processingcircuitflip-flopcircuit-diagram

Racing/ S-R Circuits?

Following truth table resulted from the circuit below. SR(NOR) latch is used. I have tried several times to trace through the circuit to see how truth table values are produced but its not working. Can someone explain to me what is going on ? This circuit was introduced in conjunction with racing although I am not sure if it has anything to do with it.

NOTE: "CLOCK" appears as a straight line to show how its connected everything. It is a normal clock that oscillates between 1 and 0. (this is how my instructor drew it). enter image description here

enter image description here

Solution

  • Strictly, this does belong on EE. The other questions you've found are likely to be old - before EE was established.

    You should look at the 1-to-0 transitions of the clock. When that occurs and only when that occurs, the value currently on S is transferred to Q.

    The Race condition appears when the clock signal is delayed, even with the tiny amount of copper track between real components. The actual waveform is not 1-0 or 0-1, it ramps between the two values. A tiny variation between two components, one seeing the transition at say 2.7V and the other at 2.5 would mean that the first component moves the value from S to Q fractionally before the second, so when the second component decides to transfer the value, it may see the value after the transfer has occurred on the prior component. You therefore may have a race between the two. These delays can also be affected by supply-rail stability and temperature, so the whole arrangement can become unreliable if not carefully designed. The condition is often overcome be deliberately routing the clock so that it will arrive at the last component in the chain first, giving that end of the chain a head-start.

    I've worked on systems where replacing a component with a faster version caused the circuit to stop working. The new component was working too fast for the remainder of the circuit - and you needed to deliberately select (or use factory-selected) slower versions.

    On a related note, before hard-drives became cheap, and floppy-drives (you may need to google that) before them it was common to use casste tapes (even more likely you'd need google on those.) Cheap and cheerful was best. If you used a professional quality recorder/player, you'd often get unusable results.