Ordinarily metastability is something digital hardware designers go out of their way to avoid.
Intel has come up with a way to harness metastability for, of all things, generating random numbers. If you're a digital geek, then you already know that generating high quality (in the cryptographic sense) random numbers is surprisingly difficult. Intel's system, to my knowledge, hasn't yet been vetted by the cryptographic professionals – but knowing what its basis is, the notion looks pretty solid to me.
High quality random numbers in every CPU. Cool...
That coupled inverter arrangement is so simple, but so clever. Thanks for linking to this.
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