Self-sustained stable oscillations of second order recursive algorithms

Recursive computation can be used to generate sine waveforms. The waveforms are degraded by the round-off noise caused by rounding the results of multiplications. The variance of the round-off noise will increase during the computation if white noise model is assumed. However, in certain cases this will not happen. In this paper the so called 'locking' phenomenon is described. A measure is given to the locking sensitivity of a certain algorithm. Some results of computer simulations and hardware measurements are also given.