This is a foundational course in digital design that aims to provide an understanding of the fundamental concepts, circuits in digital design, and expose students to the mainstream approaches and technologies used in digital design. Digital logic is the representation of signals and sequences of a digital circuit through numbers. It is the basis for digital computing and provides a fundamental understanding on how circuits and hardware communicate within a computer. Digital logic is typically embedded into most electronic devices, including calculators, computers, and watches. This field is utilized by many careers that work with computers and technology. Although most modern logic design is now achieved with computerized methods, this course covers the essential building blocks upon which modern techniques were developed. This course introduces the core logical operations and demonstrates elementary methods to design logic circuits to achieve a desired function. This course also introduces the fundamentals of combinational and sequential circuits, with their high-level implementations as demonstrations. This course allows students to gain hands-on experience by building computer hardware through the use of algorithms and simple inputs. They learn how simple inputs of ones and zeros can be used to store information on computers, including documents, images, sounds, and videos.Students should be able to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the fundamental concepts and issues and the engineering principles involved in digital design and be able to design a series of combinational and sequential circuits. In addition, they should demonstrate through hands-on experimentation knowledge of the digital design process using HDLs.
There is no required text for this course. Lecture notes and lab sheets will be posted periodically on this page. There are three reference textbooks:
Labs will be organized every week starting from the first one and a few coding questions need to be solved. There will be five written assignments, a mid-term and a final examination. The assignments will focus on digital logic theory. We try very hard to make questions unambiguous, but some ambiguities may remain. Ask if confused or state your assumptions explicitly. Reasonable assumptions will be accepted in case of ambiguous questions.
Unless otherwise specified the lectures are Wednesday 2:00pm to 3:50pm at Room TBD, SUSTech. The lab sessions are Wednesday 4:20pm to 6:10pm at Room TBD, SUSTech.
| Event | Date | Description | Materials |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week #1 | Class suspension | ||
| Week #2 | Wednesday, Feb. 19 | Course Introduction and Binary Numbers | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #3 | Wednesday, Feb. 26 | Boolean Algebra and Logic Gates | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #4 | Wednesday, Mar. 4 | Gate‐Level Minimization | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #5 | Wednesday, Mar. 11 | Two‐Level Implementation | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #6 | Wednesday, Mar. 18 | Combinational Logic I | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #7 | Wednesday, Mar. 25 | Combinational Logic II | [slides] [lab] |
| Deadline | Sunday, Mar. 29 | Assignment #1 Due | |
| Week #8 | Wednesday, Apr. 1 | Latches and Flip-flops | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #9 | Wednesday, Apr. 8 | Mid-term Examination | |
| Deadline | Friday, Apr. 10 | Assignment #2 Due | |
| Week #10 | Wednesday, Apr. 15 | Synchronous Sequential Logic I | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #11 | Wednesday, Apr. 22 | Synchronous Sequential Logic II | [slides] [lab] |
| Deadline | Friday, Apr. 24 | Assignment #3 Due | |
| Week #12 | Wednesday, Apr. 29 | Arithmetic Circuits I | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #13 | Wednesday, May 6 | Arithmetic Circuits II | [slides] [lab] |
| Deadline | Friday, May 8 | Assignment #4 Due | |
| Week #14 | Wednesday, May 13 | Registers and Counters | [slides] [lab] |
| Week #15 | Wednesday, May 20 | Programmable Logic Devices | [slides] [lab] |
| Deadline | Friday, May 22 | Assignment #5 Due | |
| Week #16 | Wednesday, May 27 | Revision | [slides] [lab] |