Digital Circuits

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Digital Circuits


This book will serve as an introduction to Digital Circuits. This book will rely heavily on the concepts of Discrete Math, but will not require any previous knowledge of the subject because all necessary math concepts will be developed in the text. This book will, however, assume a knowledge of basic electrical principles such as current, voltage, and resistance, so the reader may want to brush up on their Circuit Theory.

A mechanical engineer learns to think of everything as a spring. An electrical engineer starts off with building blocks of resistors (circuit theory) and NAND gates. From NAND gates, every part of a computer can be built. Most electronics purchased today contain a huge variety of special purpose chips including a CPU. Mass produced commercial circuits are cheaper to build this way. But digital design is typically implemented today in a chip that can be potentially turned into anything. Most digital courses today plunge straight into programming a FPGA. In any case "design" is important. This course focuses on the design and leaves the FPGA programming for another course.

Table of Contents[edit]

Digital Basics[edit]

Combinational Circuits[edit]

Sequential Circuits[edit]

State Machines[edit]

Arithmetic Circuits[edit]


Function Evaluation[edit]

Practical Digital Design[edit]


Further Reading[edit]

Wikimedia Resources[edit]


  • Horowitz and Hill, "The Art of Electronics", ISBN 0521370957
  • Tocci, Widmer, and Moss, "Digital Systems: Principles and Applications 10th Edition", ISBN 0131725793