Electrica lab report about flip flops - Essay Example

Both the latches, as well as flip-flops store data that are used for state storage (Cotten, 2001).  When the latches and flip-flops are used in finite-states machines, both the output and the next state relies on both the current output and the state of current of the flip-flop in use (Earl & Gates, 2000).  Moreover, flip-flops are used in counting of pulses, as well as in synchronization of the variably-timely input signals to a certain reference timing signal. There are various models of flip-flops (Earle, 2003).

There are the clocked, edge-triggered or synchronized types, and the simple, or transparent types. The clocked devices are what are often referred to as flip-flops, while the word latch refers to the storage elements (Earl & Gates, 2000). The ordinary flip-flop can easily be build at a pair of cross-coupled inverting elements. In many occasions, the bipolar transistors, inverters, the vacuum tubes, the inverting logic gates, and the field effect transistors have been used in the practical circuits (Roth, 1995).

Theory The clocked devices are often designed specifically for synchronous systems. These clocked devices are common in ignoring the inputs except where there is a transition of a dedicated clock signal. Clocking may lead to a case where the flip-flop retains or changes its output signal basing on the input signal values at the transition (Roth, 1995). Certain flip-flop does change the output upon the rising edge of a click while other flip-flops change on the falling edge. Now that the elementary amplifying stages are always inverting, the two stages can easily be connected as cascade in succession forming the required none-inverting amplifier (Mano & Charles, 2004).

In such like configuration, each of the amplifiers can be considered as being active inverting feedback network.  In this case, the two stages can now be connected in a kind of non-inverting loop.  It is worth noting that flip-flops can be divided into the D (delay or data), the T toggle, the SR or set-reset types, and the JK types, which of course are the most common types (Langholz & Kandel, 1998).  The diagrams below show a schematic representation of different types of representation of flip-flops.