Digital Circuits/Design Techniques

These are the standard digital circuit design techniques in this book. The goal on this page is to describe the scope and scale of this wikibook, NOT explain them to a new student. Each topic is expanded in this book. Digital circuit design techniques have these goals:

• standard format so can be reviewed
• reduce cost
• reduce digital circuit problems including
  • noise margins .. which voltages translate into 1, 0 and unknown/floating/undetermined?
  • fanout .. one output connected to many inputs weakens the output
  • propagation delays .. ripple of information through a circuit
  • 0's and 1's catching .. problems with level triggering
  • unpredictable flip flop behavior including initialization and certain states
  • races .. feedback stability .. oscillations
  • static and dynamic hazards .. combinations of the above

These are the names of the design techniques covered:

• Boolean Logic: minimal sums, products, don't care
• Circuit Levels or Layers
• Karnaugh Maps: implicants, prime implicants
• Quine-McCluskey Method
• Multiple Output Simplification
• State Diagrams, Tables (Mealy and Moore)
• Implication Tables to find Equivalent States
• Minimal State Tables
• Unused State Analysis
• State Assignment Techniques
• Excitation Tables
• Algorithmic State machines (Mealy and Moore)
• Flow Tables and their Reduction
• Races