TABLE OF CONTENTS Objective: This chapter introduces general notions about the digital electronics field. It also explains some fundamental concepts that will be useful in many succeeding chapters. In summary, it sets the environment for the digital circuit analysis and designs that follow.
Chapter Contents
| 1.1 | Historical Notes |
| 1.2 | Analog versus Digital |
| 1.3 | Bits, Bytes, and Words |
| 1.4 | Digital Circuits |
| 1.5 | Combinational Circuits versus Sequential Circuits |
| 1.6 | Integrated Circuits |
| 1.7 | Printed Circuit Boards |
| 1.8 | Logic Values versus Physical Values |
| 1.9 | Nonprogrammable, Programmable, and Hardware Programmable |
| 1.10 | Binary Waveforms |
| 1.11 | DC, AC, and Transient Responses |
| 1.12 | Programmable Logic Devices |
| 1.13 | Circuit Synthesis and Simulation with VHDL |
| 1.14 | Circuit Simulation with Spice |
| 1.15 | Gate-Level versus Transistor-Level analysis |
The modern era of electronics started with the invention of the transistor by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey) in 1947. A partial picture of the original experiment is shown in Figure 1.1(a), and a popular commercial package, made out of plastic and called TO-92, is depicted in Figure 1.1(b). Before that, electronic circuits were constructed with vacuum tubes (Figure 1.1(c)), which were large (almost the size of a household light bulb), slow, and required high voltage and high power.
The first transistor was called a point-contact transistor because it consisted of two gold foils whose tips were pressed against a piece of germanium. This can...
