SEASONS

Taken As Given

Me: it's like the one thing I'm missing... digital circuits =(
Me: I can do analog and I can do Verilog. I can't do what's inbetween =(
Bigi: digital is coolest man.
Me: nah, analog is the coolest =)
Me: can't design clocks with digital =)
Bigi: analog no good for teh brain. nah.
Bigi: well, we USE clocks. =)
Bigi: speaking of it i never knew how a clock itself actually works.... lol

Do you ever think about how things work? You know, all those things that you assume are given. It's kinda funny: the more you learn, the more of those "givens" you run into. Learning seems to create more questions than it answers.

Oh, and how do you create a clock signal? To create a sinusoidal signal, you'd use an oscillator. An oscillator is a feedback circuit that is initially unstable, but eventually reaches a periodic steady-state. High-frequency oscillators (something like Mhz+) generally make use of crystals like quartz because crystals only resonate at an extremely small range of frequencies. This makes crystals very good for precision timing; crystals are ~1000x better than equivalent circuits using on-chip inductors and capacitors.

With a sinusoidal signal in hand, you'd need a circuit to "square-ify" it. Probably an amplifier that rails easily? Hmm... never really thought about it.