Contemporary Logic Design [Repost]

In the past ten years there has been a revolution in the practice of hardware design. Professionals now rely on CAD software, rapid prototyping, and programmable logic devices to streamline the design process. Contemporary Logic Design is the first text to address these changes and offer a truly modern introduction to logic design. From the first chapter, the author complements his presentation of logic design theory with discussions of current design technologies.The book provides comprehensive coverage of programmable logic, including ROMs, PALs, and PLAs. A Practical Matters section concludes most chapters, which ties theory to practice and explains design technologies in detail. To synthesize the text coverage of combinational and sequential design methods, the author uses a detailed case study of a simple processor design in the final two chapters.The text introduces readers to a wide range of software tools, including schematic capture, logic simulation and Boolean minimization, and dem-onstrates how they fit into the hardware design process. The author also encourages hands-on experimentation with software tools such as LogicWorks to bolster the reader's understanding of practical design methods.


Reader's review

This is a sound, competent introduction to the elements of contemporary logic design. It covers all the basics: boolean logic, gate implementations, and the elements of binary arithmetic. It talks about minimization techniques, logic delays, and some of the classic logic implementation technologies (PLAs, decoders, muxes). It gives the basics of common notation, including timing diagrams, gate-level schematics, and so on. The last few chapters discuss synchronous (clocked) design and design of state machines, including standard reduction techniques. All the basics of modern design are there. A good student will start to see the number of different ways any problem can be solved, and start to recongize that no one perspective will solve all problems, at least not well.

Asynchronous logic, based on stable states of combinational circuits with feedback, is one of the topics skipped. That's still important in the interior of flip-flops and in niche application areas, but asynchronous design certainly not in the main stream any more. Likewise, the authors skip over transistor-level design (mostly), the oddities of J-K flops, and most discussion of discrete or MSI logic. Well, that makes sense. Most logic these days is implemented in PALs (which are covered) or larger-scale devices. 7400-level devices have pretty much gone the way of relays and tubes - of historical interest, mostly. Remember that this is "Contemporary" logic, and those aren't big concerns in the daily work of most contemporary logic designers.

There are other omissions that make sense for a first-term course. Hardware description languages (e.g. Verilog or VHDL) are barely mentioned; they're critical in daily practice, but may not be useful until students have mastered this book's level. Micro-sequencers might also be a bit advanced for this presentation, despite their usefulness and their conceptual importance in later courses. More complex design examples would have helped, but would probably have started making bad assumptions about tools available to the student. Sticking to simple problems, however, may not prepare the student for systems of realistic complexity. Some of the omissions really don't do the student any favors. When logic design is so separate from other kinds of circuit design, students come away with a critical lack of understanding of how logic fits into a whole system. There's just no mention of signal integrity, drive strength, power consumption, jitter and skew, interfacing, or all the points where logic hits the rest of the world. Nothing in this book prepares a student for reading a standard spec sheet, let alone reading between its lines. I can only hope that instructors using this book make up for some of those deficiencies in supplementary material or in the lab.