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Newsletters - 10 TechJobs - 11 Slashdot Broadband 12 Search 13 X 14 Click Here 15 Welcome to Slashdot 16 It's funny. Sections 24 Main 25 Apache 26 Apple 27 Askslashdot 28 Books 29 BSD 1 more 30 Developers 1 more 31 Games 10 more 32 Interviews 33 Science 2 more 34 YRO Help 35 FAQ 36 Bugs Stories 37 Old Stories 38 Old Polls 39 Topics 40 Hall of Fame 41 Submit Story 42 About 43 Supporters 44 Code 45 Awards Services 46 Broadband 47 Online Books 48 PriceGrabber 49 Product News 50 Tech Jobs Contemporary Logic Design 51 News Posted by 52 Hemos on Wed Oct 20, '99 09:50 AM Contemporary Logic Design, written by Randy H. The tome is a thorough introduction to the world of digital logic design. Click below to learn more about whether the book is for you or not. Katz pages 699 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9/10 reviewer 54 Deepak Saxena ISBN 0-8053-2703-7 summary A good, thorough introduction to the world of digital logic design. The Scenario You can code perl in your sleep, answer computer questions for all your non-geek friends, and create robust database-backed web sites for a living. The best description for you is that of software artist: You weave patterns of 1's and 0's that bring life to what would otherwise just be a hunk of silicon. However, you've always wondered how those 1's and 0's you create actually work. How does the flow of electrons through the silicon's microscopic pathways turn into the addition of two numbers? If you've ever asked any of these questions, you're ready to delve into the world of digital logic and computer architecture, and this book was written with you in mind. Contemporary Logic Design provides a thorough introduction to the world of digital logic design. The author does an excellent job of not only presenting the concepts behind hardware design, but also covers some of the common pitfalls such as timing issues and dealing with the fact that hardware is not perfect. The book is logically divided into three groups of chapters that build on each other towards the final goal: Design of a simple 16-bit processor. The first five chapters of the book cover the concept of combinational logic. This is the creation of simple circuits that take a given input and provide a given output in which there is no feedback between output and input (for example 1 AND 0 = 0). First, the author covers the basic building blocks of digital logic: AND, OR, and NOT gates. The fifth chapter completes the first section with excellent information on the representation of numbers in hardware and implementation of basic add, subtract, and multiply circuits. Chapters six through ten teach the reader about the world of sequential logic design. Sequential logic is that in which the previous state of the system affects the next given output. Sequential operation is at the heart of computer systems, and this is where the book excels. The basic theory of sequential logic is covered, and several useful examples such as binary counters, a simple DRAM chip, and a vending machine controller are used to demonstrate the principles. The final two chapters provide and introduction to computer architecture and implementation. An excellent overview of computer organization is provided, and a 16 bit CPU is used as a case study of implementation issues. While the book covers hardware, the author does an excellent job of keeping from getting too low level by delving into issues such as resistance, capacitance, and transistors. In a few places, the circuit design issues are brought up, but the are generally explained in enough detail that someone with no experience in electronics can understand. For those that are interested in the lowest level details, an appendix provides information on how digital gates are built up from basic analog components. While the information covered is well presented, it is difficult material and you will often need to re-read a section several times before you clearly understand it, so plan to spend a few months with this book. In addition, many of concepts that are in the book cannot really be completely understood without seeing them in action. For this reason, I suggest that if you are interested in this material and get this book, you should do one of the following: a) Go to your local Radio Shack or your local electronics store and pick up one of those "101 digital logic projects" kits or b) pick up some digital logic simulation software (see 55 this page on Freshmeat for a list of Linux offerings). Either option will allow you to actually build the circuits that are described and see how changing certain aspects will change their behavior. In Summary If you want to learn about computer hardware design, this is the book for you. It provides a thorough introduction to the subject without requiring much previous knowledge of electronics. The only warning is that you should have plenty of time in which to digest the information contained within this tome and that you should get some real digital hardware with which to experiment as you learn the material. Slashdot's book review section is full of reader-submitted reviews of books you should know about. Just read Slashdot's 69 book review guidelines, and then 70 use the web submission form. Updated: 20031013 17:00 by timothy This discussion has been archived. Change The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. People talk a lot about (digital) "hardware" and "software," but they're really the same thing (well, if you ignore analog effects). Understanding how the hardware works can provide great insight about how to design software. Hardware design was probably the first type of "object-oriented" or "modular" programming. It's a lot of high-level design, specifying interfaces and plugging components together. People who are good at one of these fields will have developed a good skill set that should transfer well to the other. A microprocessor is really just one big parallel program. It also covers everything in the "Organization and Design" book. These books assume the reader knows something about digital logic design. Johnson's Superscalar Microprocessor Design is also a good one. However for the introductory ECE class that CS majors have to take I used another book, Digital Logic Circuit Analysis & Design by Victor Nelson et al. With only skimming over the web version of Contemporary Logic Design and comparing it to Digital Logic Circuit Analysis & Design the two books seem to cover the same main topics near the beginning. However, DLCA&D goes into more detail with boolean algebra but CLD seems to discuss topics in the last chapter that DLCA&D does not. But DLCA&D seems to cover many more topics that CLD does not seem to even touch. In the last chapters DLCA&D seems to focus on Progammable Logic Devices and testing of circuits. Has anyone else had any experience with Digital Logic Circuit Analysis & Design and could perhaps correct anything I might have missed or misstated? Looks like Renrior for Dummies (Score:1) by 83 wilkinsm (13507) on Wednesday October 20, @09:43AM ( 84 #1599416) It looks like Contemporary Logic Design revolves more around state logic than actual implemetion. Computer Organization and Design is more the physical layout. It's kind like comparing Spice to Renrior - different tools for different approaches. This book seems to get really heavy into state logic, which is really not as important as implementation. You can solve any problem by adding states, but it just slows things down. Being able to implement good forwarding, hazard detection or parallel logic seems to be a more important skill these days. So when computers rolled around, someone thought, hey, let's just use a synchronous clock for boolean logic. Well, that was great for 2KHz, 1MHz and probably as high as 100MHz. In essence, as long as we keep teaching boolean as a form of digital logic, the longer computers will continue to hard to design at higher speeds and lower densities! Again, boolean algebra is NOT the IDEAL MATH to use for digital circuits. Additionlly, boolean clocked gates require two states, low and high. Even when a gate is "off", there is still som...
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