Fundamentals of Logic Design Introduction:
1. Digital Systems and Switching Circuits:
Digital systems are used in computation and data processing, control systems, communications,
and measurement.
Digital systems are also capable of greater accuracy and reliability compare to analog systems;
many tasks formerly done by analog systems are now being performed digitally.
The physical quantities or signals in digital systems cam assume only discrete values, while in
analog systems the physical quantities or signals may vary continuously over a specific time.
Digital systems work with discrete quantities in many cases they can be designed so that for a
given input, the output is exactly correct.
Digital systems may be divided into three parts – system design, logic design, and circuit design.
System Design: involves breathing the overall system into subsystems and specifying the
characteristics of each subsystem.
Circuit Design: involves specifying the interconnection of specific components such as resistors,
diodes, and transistors to form a gate, flip-flop or other logic building block.
Logic Design:
Most contemporary circuit design is done in integrated circuit form using appropriate computer-
aided design tools to layout and interconnect the components on a chip of silicon.
Many of a digital system’s subsystems take the form of a switching circuit that has one or more
inputs and one or more outputs which take on discrete values.
Two types of switching circuits: combinational and sequential
Combinational Circuit: the output values depend only on the present value of the inputs and
not on the past values. Are easier to design than sequential circuits. The basic building blocks
used to construct combinational circuits are logic gates.
The logic designer must determine how to interconnect these gates in order to convert the
circuit input signals into he desired output signals.
The relationship between the input and output signals can be described mathematically as
Boolean algebra.
Starting from a given problem statement, the first step in designing a combinational logic circuit
is to derive a table of the algebraic logic equation which describe the circuit outputs as a
function of the circuit inputs.
In order to design an economical circuit to realize these output functions, the logic equations
which describe the circuit outputs generally must be simplified.
Sequential Circuit: The outputs depend on both the present and past input values.
In order to determine the output of a sequential circuit, the sequence of the input values must
be specified. The sequential circuit is said to have memory, while a combinational circuit has no
memory. In general, a sequential circuit is composed of a combinational circuit with added
memory elements.
The basic memory elements used in the design of sequential circuits are called flip-flops.
Analysis of more general sequential circuits were using timing diagrams, state tables, and
graphs.
These flip-flops can be interconnected with gates to form counters and registers.
Analysis of more general sequential circuits were using timing diagrams, state tables, and
graphs.
The first step in designing a sequential switching circuit is to construct a state table or graph
which describes the relationship between the input and output sequences.
The sequential circuits usually designed as synchronous sequential circuits because they use a
common timing signal, called a clock to synchronize the operation of the memory elements.
The combinational and sequential design techniques are applied to the realization of systems for
performing binary addition, multiplication, and division.
Today, a hardware description language, VHDL, is used in designing the combinational logic,
sequential logic, and digital systems.
VHDL is used to describe, simulate, and synthesize digital hardware. After writing VHDL code,
the designer can use computer-aided design software to compile the hardware description and
complete the design of the digital logic.
This allows the completion of complex designs without having to manually work out detailed
circuit descriptions in terms of gates and flip-flops.
The switching devices used in digital systems are generally two-state devices, that is the output
ca assume only two difference discrete values.
