Handbook

Digital systems store, move and process information. Digital systems consist of logic circuits and are a key component of computers and other products such as smartphones, digital watches, household appliances and electronic games. Digital systems are integral to different areas in electrical engineering such as digital signal processing, telecommunications, speech analysis and recognition, power electronics and control systems. Knowledge of digital systems is thus a core capability for all electrical engineers.

This course will provide an introduction to modern digital logic design. It will cover the analysis and design of combinational and sequential logic circuits, computer design fundamentals as well as the digital switches used to build digital systems. The course will start by covering basic logic gates, Boolean algebra, two-level logic and then build to the analysis and design of combinational logic circuits,  regular logic structures, multi-level networks, combination circuit building blocks and implementation of combinational circuits. It will also cover topics in sequential logic, which will include basic latches and flip-flops, timing methodologies, analysis and design of Finite state machines (FSMs), state minimization, state encoding, counters, registers and implementation of FSMs. Elements of computers will be introduced, specifically arithmetic circuits, arithmetic and logic units, register and bus structures, controllers/ sequencers, programmable logic devices and microprogramming. CMOS and TTL digital switch technologies, the building blocks of digital systems, will be also covered. The course will provide hands-on experience with computer-aided design tools for logic design, schematic entry, state diagram entry, hardware description language entry, compilation to logic networks, simulation and mapping to programmable logic devices.