ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Contamination delay

Contamination delay is like when you are playing a game of telephone with your friends. You whisper a message in your friend's ear and they pass it on to the next person. But sometimes, someone might accidentally change the message a little bit when they pass it along. This means that by the time the message gets to the last person, it might be different than the original message you started with.

In electronics, this is called contamination delay. It happens when a change in a signal takes a little bit of time to spread through different parts of a circuit. This delay can cause some parts of the circuit to get a different signal at different times, which can cause errors or problems.

Imagine you have a toy car and you press a button to make it go. But the button is far away from the car, so it takes a little bit of time for the signal to travel from the button to the car. This delay can cause the car to start moving a little bit later than you expected.

In electronics, contamination delay is similar. It's like a delay between when one part of the circuit changes and when the rest of the circuit catches up. This delay can cause problems in some cases, like when you're trying to synchronize different parts of a circuit to work together.

Overall, contamination delay is just a fancy way of saying that sometimes signals take a little bit of time to travel through a circuit and cause changes. It's like a game of telephone, but with electronics!