10. Synchronization and Arbitration

Of course, given the vagueries of inaccuracies and noise, the ball is never precisely at the metastable point; it will always feel some slight force toward the left or the right. It will always roll down the hill to one of the stable equilibria eventually; but, depending on its distance from the metastable point, this trip may take an arbitrarily long time. Observable Metastable Behavior 10.3.2. Observable Metastable Behavior One reason for the reluctance of the digital community to accept the inevitability of arbitration failures is that they are inherently difficult to reproduce reliably in the laboratory. Even when violating the dynamic discipline by clocking unsynchronized data into a flip flop at high frequencies, observable metastable behavior is quite rare: it depends on pathological accidents of timing or other variables with precision beyond our ability to control them reliably.

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