Wednesday, October 11, 2017

A good course in digital electronics

For several decades I taught a course in digital electronics. Because of my work and interests in both physics and computer science it seemed a natural. I was never satisfied with the very abstract way in which most of the text books ended the course talking about digital computers. They were mostly "boxology." By the time I ended my stint teaching such a course I finally had what I thought was a complete digital electronics course. Chapters 1-7, 9, 10, and 11 were pretty much Tocci's Digital Systems (Prentice Hall, 1985 or 1988). The 3rd or 4th edition was fine. I actually preferred it to later editions. I would then use chapter 8 of M. Morris Mano's Computer Engineering Hardware Design (Prentice Hall, 1988) to describe how one could design a simple digital computer (Mano, figure 8-16, page 291). The accompanying lab had students use discrete logic gates to build circuits up to and including an adding machine. Jim C. De Loach's lab manual, 4th edition, was good for that (Prentice Hall, 1988). A 3 credit hour lecture (for 1 semester) and a 1 or 2 credit hour lab is sufficient to do all of this.

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed that course very much,and it significantly improved my hobby and professional-related electronics work. I refer back to my notes and resources fairly frequently.

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