This book is written for young professionals and graduate students who have prior logic design background and want to learn how to use logic blocks to build a complete system from design specifications. My two-decade-long industry experience has taught me that engineers are “shape-oriented” people, and that they tend to learn from charts and diagrams. Therefore, the teaching method you will see in this textbook caters this mid-set: a lot of circuit schematics, block diagrams, timing diagrams, and examples supported by minimal text. The book has eight chapters. The first three chapters give a complete review of the logic design principles since rest of the chapters significantly depend on this review. Chapter 1 concentrates on the combinational logic design. It describes basic logic gates, De Morgan’s theorem, truth tables, and logic minimization. The chapter uses these key concepts in order to design megacells, namely various types of adders and multipliers. Chapter 2 introduces sequential logic components, namely latches, flip-flops, registers and counters. It introduces the concept of timing diagrams to explain the functionality of each logic block. Moore and Mealy-type state machines, counter– decoder-type controllers, and the construction of simple memories are also explained in this chapter. Chapter 2 is the first chapter that illustrates the design process: how to develop architectural logic blocks using timing diagrams and how to build a controller from a timing diagram to govern data flow. Chapter 3 focuses on the review of asynchronous logic design, which includes state definitions, primitive flow tables, and state minimization. Racing conditions in asynchronous designs, how to detect and correct them are also explained in this chapter. The chapter ends with designing an important asynchronous timing block: the C (or the Mueller) element and describes an asynchronous timing methodology that leads to a complete design using timing diagrams. From Chaps. 4 to 8, computer architecture-related topics are covered. Chapter 4 examines a very essential system element: system bus and communication protocols between system modules.
