University of Gondar

Institute IoT
of Technology
Digital Logic Design
(CoEng3092)

Lecture-01: Introduction to DLD

By Kindu Tigabu
 Introduction to Digital Logics
 Digital logic design is a system in electrical and computer engineering that uses
simple number values to produce input and output operations.
 The term digital is derived from the way operations are performed, by counting
digits.
 Applications of digital electronics were confined to computer systems.
 Today, digital technology is applied in a wide range of areas in addition to
computers.
 Television, communications systems, radar, navigation and guidance systems, military
systems, medical instrumentation, industrial process control, and consumer electronics use
digital techniques.
 Over the years digital technology has progressed from vacuum-tube circuits to discrete
transistors to complex integrated circuits, many of which contain millions of transistors,
and many of which are programmable.
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 Digital and Analog Quantities
 Electronic circuits can be divided into two broad categories
1. Digital
2. Analog.
 Digital electronics involves quantities with discrete values.
 Analog electronics involves quantities with continuous values.
 Although we will be studying digital fundamentals in this course, you should
also know something about analog because many applications require both; and
interfacing between analog and digital is important.
 Most things that can be measured quantitatively occur in nature in analog form.
 Example: time, pressure, distance, and sound

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 Digital and Analog Quantities
 For example, the air temperature changes over a continuous range of values.
 If you graphed the temperature on a typical summer day, you would have a

smooth, continuous curve.

FIGURE 1–1 Graph of an analog quantity (temperature versus time). 4

 Digital and Analog Quantities
 Rather than graphing the temperature on a continuous basis, suppose you just
take a temperature reading every hour.
 Now you have sampled values representing the temperature at discrete points

in time (every hour) over a 24-hour period, as indicated in Figure 1–2

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 The Digital Advantage
 Majority of applications in electronics, as well as in most other technologies, use
digital techniques to perform operations that were once performed using analog
methods.
 The chief reasons for the shift to digital technology are:
1. Digital systems are generally easier to design.
 The circuits used in digital systems are switching circuits, where exact values of voltage or
current are not important, only the range (HIGH or LOW) in which they fall.
2. Information storage is easy.
 Billions of bits of information can be stored in a relatively small physical space.
 Analog storage capabilities are, by contrast, extremely limited
4. Digital circuits are less affected by noise.
 Spurious fluctuations in voltage (noise) are not as critical in digital systems because the
exact value of a voltage is not important, as long as the noise is not large enough to prevent
us from distinguishing a HIGH from a LOW.
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 The Digital Advantage
4. Accuracy and precision are easier to maintain throughout the system.
 Once a signal is digitized, the degree to which it deteriorates is predictable and more easily
contained within acceptable limits.
 In analog systems, the voltage and current signals tend to be distorted by the effects of
temperature, humidity, and component tolerance variations in the circuits that process the
signal.
5. Operations can be programmed.
 It is fairly easy to design digital systems whose operation is controlled by a set of stored
instructions called a program.
 Analog systems can also be programmed, but the variety and the complexity of the available
operations are severely limited.
6. More digital circuitry can be fabricated on IC chips.
 Its relative complexity and its use of devices that cannot be economically integrated (high-
value capacitors, precision resistors, inductors, transformers) have prevented analog systems
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from achieving the same high degree of integration.
 Limitations of Digital Techniques
 There are really very few drawbacks when using digital techniques.
 The two biggest problems are:
• The real world is analog and digitizing always introduces some error.
• Processing digitized signals takes time.
 To take advantage of digital techniques when dealing with analog inputs and
outputs, four steps must be followed:
1. Convert the physical variable to an electrical signal (analog).
2. Convert the electrical (analog) signal into digital form.
3. Process (operate on) the digital information.
4. Convert the digital outputs back to real-world analog form.

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A System Using Digital and Analog
Methods

Diagram of a precision digital temperature control system

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A System Using Digital and Analog
Methods

Basic block diagram of a CD player

 Logic Levels and Digital Waveforms
 Digital electronics involves circuits and systems in which there are only two
possible states.
 These states are represented by two different voltage levels:
 A HIGH and a LOW.

 The two states can also be represented by current levels, bits and bumps on a
CD or DVD, etc.
 In digital systems such as computers, combinations of the two states, called
codes, are used to represent numbers, symbols, alphabetic characters, and
other types of information.
 The two-state number system is called binary, and its two digits are 0 and 1.
 A binary digit is called a bit.
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 Logic Levels
 The voltages used to represent a 1 and a 0 are called logic levels.
 Ideally, one voltage level represents a HIGH and another voltage level represents a LOW.
 In a practical digital circuit
 A HIGH can be any voltage between a specified minimum value and a
specified maximum value.
 A LOW can be any voltage between a specified minimum and a specified
maximum.
 There can be no overlap between the accepted range of HIGH levels and the
accepted range of LOW levels.

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 Logic Levels
Logic levels and timing

Undefined logic level

a) Logic level ranges of voltage b) Logic level for typical CMOS circuit c) Signal levels changing over time
for a digital circuit.

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 Digital Waveforms
 Digital waveforms consist of voltage levels that are changing back and forth between the
HIGH and LOW levels or states.

Figure 1– Ideal pulses

 Pulse
 A pulse has two edges: a leading edge that occurs first at time t 0 and a trailing edge that
occurs last at time t1.
 For a positive-going pulse, the leading edge is a rising edge, and the trailing edge is a
falling edge.
 The pulses in the above Figure are ideal because the rising and falling edges are assumed
to change in zero time (instantaneously). 14
 Digital Waveforms
 Non-ideal pulse
 Real applications exhibit this characteristic
 Overshoot and ringing – produced by stray inductive and capacitive effects
 Droop – caused by stray capacitive and circuit resistance (forming an RC circuit)

 Important items:
– Rise time
– Fall time
– Amplitude
– Pulse width

Nonideal pulse characteristics 15

 Digital Waveforms
 Information on important items
 Rise time (tr): The time required for a pulse to go from its LOW level to its
HIGH level. (from 10% to 90% of the pulse amplitude)
 Fall time (tf): The time required for the transition from the HIGH level to the
LOW level. (from 90% to 10% of the pulse amplitude)
 Amplitude: height measured between HIGH and LOW (or vice versa).
Measurement for rise and fall time usually made within 10% to 90% of pulse
amplitude.
 Pulse width (tw): duration of pulse, measured at 50% points on the rising and
falling edges.

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 Waveform Characteristics
 Series of pulses can be found in digital systems – called as pulse trains
 This can be further classified as periodic and nonperiodic
 Periodic – repeating the same waveform at a fixed interval, called period (T)
 Nonperiodic – opposite to periodic, where the waveform does not repeat itself
at a fixed interval
 Terms to be remembered (and of course to understand) are
 Period (T)– the total of time that a waveform repeats itself
 Frequency (F)– the rate of how many times a waveform repeats itself
 Duty cycle – the ratio of the pulse width to the period in percentage

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 Waveform Characteristics

 Relationships between period, frequency and duty cycle

 Period: T

 Frequency: f

DutyCycle
 Duty cycle:

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 Waveform Characteristics
1. A portion of a periodic digital waveform is shown in Figure bellow. The
measurements are in milliseconds. Determine the following:
A. Period
B. Frequency
C. duty cycle

2. A periodic digital waveform has a pulse width of 25 ms and a period of 150 ms.
Determine the frequency and the duty cycle
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Waveform Characteristics

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 What a Digital Waveform Carries?
 All binary information in digital systems appear as waveforms that represent
sequences of bits.
 Common approach: HIGH is 1 and LOW is 0
 Bit time – each bit in a sequence occupies a defined time interval
 What we have to know/learn to further understand this?
 Clock – a basic timing waveform that is used to synchronize all waveforms
in digital systems
 Timing diagram – a graph of digital waveforms showing the actual time
relationship of two or more waveforms, and how each waveform changes in
relation to the others.

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 Clock
 Must be periodic!
 Used to synchronize all waveforms in digital systems
 Each interval between pulses in clock equals the time for one bit
 It, itself does not carry any information

 Each change in level of waveform A occurs at the leading edge of the clock waveform.
 In other cases, level changes occur at the trailing edge of the clock. 22
 Timing diagrams
 A timing diagram is a graph of digital waveforms showing the actual time
relationship of two or more waveforms and how each waveform changes in
relation to the others
 Using timing diagrams, we can determine:
 The states(HIGH or LOW) of all waveforms at any specified time
 The exact time a waveform changes relative to other waveforms

 Notice that all three waveforms are HIGH only during bit time 7 and change back to
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LOW at the end of bit time 7.
 Data Transfer
 Data refers to groups of bits that convey some type of information.
 Binary data, which are represented by digital waveforms, must be transferred
from one device to another within a digital system in order to accomplish a given
purpose.
 For example, numbers stored in binary form in the memory of a computer must be
transferred to the computer’s central processing unit in order to be added.
• The sum of the addition must then be transferred to a monitor for display and/or
transferred back to the memory
 Method of transfer
 Serial
 Parallel

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 Data Transfer: Serial
 When bits are transferred in serial from one point to another, they are sent one bit
at a time along a single line.
 During the time interval from t0 to t1, the first bit is transferred.
 During the time interval from t1 to t2, the second bit is transferred, and so on.
 To transfer eight bits in series, it takes eight time intervals.
 Slow. Why??
 The data have to transferred one by one
 Advantage:
• Requires only one line

Serial transfer of 8 bit data 25

 Data Transfer: Parallel
 Data are transferred in parallel form from one point to another
 During transfer, all the bits in a group are sent out on separate lines
simultaneously
 Fast. Why??
• A few bits can be sent at one time
 Disadvantage:
• Requires a number of lines equal to
the number of bits to be transferred

Parallel transfer of 8 bit data

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 Data Transfer: Summary
 Summary of Serial and Parallel Transfer
Transfer Type Transfer Speed Cost
Serial Slow Low( Good)
Parallel Fast High (Not Good)

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 Data Transfer: Example
 Example:
a) Determine the total time required to serially transfer the eight bits contained in
waveform A of the Figure below, and indicate the sequence of bits. The left-most bit is
the first to be transferred. The 1 MHz clock is used as reference.
b) What is the total time to transfer the same eight bits in parallel?

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 Data Transfer: Example
 Solutions:
a) Since the frequency of the clock is 1 MHz, the period is

i.e. It takes 1 micro second to transfer each bit in the waveform. The total transfer time for
8 bits is

The sequence of bits

 During each bit time.
 If waveform A is HIGH during the bit time, a 1 is transferred.
 If waveform A is LOW during the bit time, a 0 is transferred.

b) A parallel transfer would take 1µs for all eight bits. 29

 Basic Logic Functions
 Something about logics:
 1850s– Geoge Boolean (Irish logician and mathematician) developed a
mathematical system for formulating logic statements with symbols so that
problems can be written and solved in a manner similar to ordinary algebra.
 Real world basic example:
 “The light is on” – we need to think about the bulb’s condition and the
switch. What is all this about?? Think about!!!
 The term “logic” is applied to digital circuits to implement logic functions
 Digital logic circuits are the basic elements that form the building blocks for such
complex digital systems as the computer.
 The Three basic logic operations are NOT, AND, and OR

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 Basic Logic Functions: NOT
 One input and one output
 Also known as “inverter”. Why??
 The output will always opposite to the input
 Definition:
 Operation that changes one logic level to the opposite logic level

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 Basic Logic Functions: AND
 Input can be at least two and output is one
 Definition:
 Operation produces a HIGH output only when all the inputs are HIGH

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 Basic Logic Functions: OR
 Input can be at least two and output is one
 Definition:
 Operation produces a HIGH output when one or more inputs are HIGH

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 What we have learnt today?
 Digital waveforms and the characteristics
 Clock and time diagram
 Data transfer
 Basic logic operations

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Thank you !!!