Combinational loops are among the most common causes of instability and unreliability in digital designs. They should be avoided whenever possible. In a synchronous design, feedback loops should include registers. Combinational loops generally violate synchronous design principles by establishing a direct feedback loop that contains no registers. For example, a combinational loop occurs when the left-hand side of an arithmetic expression also appears on the right-hand side in HDL code. A combinational loop also occurs when you feed back the output of a register to an asynchronous pin of the same register through combinational logic.