Questions about Frequency and how it applies to Electronics

[alphaai]

Hello,

Got some questions.

1) Does a electronic circuit with a high frequency timer mean that an input can receive data faster than if it was connected to a low frequency timer?

I don't understand how a timer could be useful in electronics. I understand how it is useful in microcontrollers as ive done some playing around with the arduino.

 

[Sceadwian]

microcontrollers are electronics, how do you not see a high frequency timer being used in electronics? How do you see it and define electronics where you do not understand the importance of the frequency of a timer?

 

[alphaai]

Hello,

I understand that with programming I could fire an event faster by decreasing how fast it trigger the events by dropping the 1000 milliseconds down to 500 milliseconds.
But how does that work in the electronics world, im not referring to microcontrollers cos everything is taken care for you.

Ive just read that some ICs require a clock signal and apparently the clock signal needs to be generated by a clock generator
Is the crystal oscillator a clock generator?
So whenever the IC receives a pulse from the clock signal then that would cause the IC to output something
everytime the value is triggered?

Thanks,

Ben

 

[carbonzit]

Yes, crystals are often used to generate clock pulses, especially when accuracy is important. If accuracy is not critical, lots of other ways to generate clocks: 555 timers, multivibrators, phase-shift oscillators, etc.

All chips like microprocessors require a clock to operate: otherwise, they'd just be sitting there in a static state doing nothing. The clock drives the operation of the chip (or circuit), advancing it from one state to the next. The state may or may not output anything. In a chip like your computer's CPU, the clock steps the processor through its "microprogram", where each machine instruction (like, say, ADD A B, which adds the contents of two registers), may take several clock cycles to complete.

 

[crutschow]

There are two types of logic circuits, synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous logic uses a clock to insure that each logic step in a computer or digital system is performed in the proper sequence and without overlap to the next function. Most digital data, consists of a series of digital words with each word representing a value, (for example one word can represent one pixel in a TV or computer screen). To keep this data in proper order each word is clocked through the processing system in sequence which keeps them from being jumbled together. This data is usually clocked very rapidly so it may seem like continuous data, such as displayed on a screen, but it actually is processed and displayed one pixel at a time.

Asynchronous logic does not use a clock and it typically only used for small (glue) logic functions that respond to only one set of data at a time.