Delay-line oscillator

A delay line oscillator is a form of electronic oscillator that uses a delay line as its principal timing element.

By inverting the output of the delay line and feeding that signal back to the input of the delay line, the circuit is caused to oscillate. Properly designed, the simplest style of the circuit will oscillate with a period of two times the delay period of the delay line. By the use of additional taps from the delay line additional outputs can be derived that are correlated in frequency with the main output but vary in phase.

The delay line oscillator may be allowed to free run or it may be gated for use in asynchronous logic.