Ring oscillator

Okay, kiddo, a ring oscillator is something that makes a beeping sound, kind of like a countdown timer, but instead of counting down, it just keeps beeping over and over again. It's called a "ring oscillator" because it works by having a bunch of little "rings" that pass the beeping sound back and forth to each other.

Here's how it works: imagine you have a line of five friends who are holding hands. You want them to pass a ball back and forth down the line as quickly as they can. So, you tell the first friend to pass the ball to the second friend, who then passes it to the third friend, and so on, until the fifth friend catches it and passes it back to the first friend again. Then, the whole process starts over.

Now, imagine that instead of passing a ball, your friends are passing a beep. The first friend beeps, and it travels down the line to the second friend, and then the third friend, and so on, until it reaches the fifth friend, who beeps and sends it back to the first friend. This creates a cycle of beeps that repeats over and over again, as long as your friends keep passing the beep.

A ring oscillator works in a similar way, except instead of friends holding hands, little electronic components called "inverters" pass the beep from one to the other. Each inverter takes the beep it receives and "inverts" it, or flips it upside down, before passing it on to the next inverter. This creates a feedback loop, where the beeps keep getting passed back and forth in a circle, creating a beeping sound.

And that's how a ring oscillator works, kiddo! It's a cycle of electronic components passing a signal back and forth, creating a repeating sound.