Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with VHDL

The overall goal of this book is to fill a void that has appeared in the instruction of digital circuits over the past decade due to the rapid abstraction of system design. Up until the mid-1980s, digital circuits were designed using classical techniques. Classical techniques relied heavily on manual design practices for the synthesis, minimization, and interfacing of digital systems. Corresponding to this design style, academic textbooks were developed that taught classical digital design techniques. Around 1990, large-scale digital systems began being designed using hardware description languages (HDL) and automated synthesis tools. Broad-scale adoption of this modern design approach spread through the industry during this decade. Around 2000, hardware description languages and the modern digital design approach began to be taught in universities, mainly at the senior and graduate level. There were a variety of reasons that the modern digital design approach did not penetrate the lower levels of academia during this time. First, the design and simulation tools were difficult to use and overwhelmed freshman and sophomore students. Second, the ability to implement the designs in a laboratory setting was infeasible. The modern design tools at the time were targeted at custom integrated circuits, which are cost- and time-prohibitive to implement in a university setting. Between 2000 and 2005, rapid advances in programmable logic and design tools allowed the modern digital design approach to be implemented in a university setting, even in lower-level courses. This allowed students to learn the modern design approach based on HDLs and prototype their designs in real hardware, mainly field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This spurred an abundance of textbooks to be authored teaching hardware description languages and higher levels of design abstraction. This trend has continued until today. While abstraction is a critical tool for engineering design, the rapid movement toward teaching only the modern digital design techniques has left a void for freshman- and sophomore-level courses in digital circuitry. Legacy textbooks that teach the classical design approach are outdated and do not contain sufficient coverage of HDLs to prepare the students for follow-on classes. Newer textbooks that teach the modern digital design approach move immediately into high-level behavioral modeling with minimal or no coverage of the underlying hardware used to implement the systems. As a result, students are not being provided the resources to understand the fundamental hardware theory that lies beneath the modern abstraction such as interfacing, gate-level implementation, and technology optimization. Students moving too rapidly into high levels of abstraction have little understanding of what is going on when they click the “compile and synthesize” button of their design tool. This leads to graduates who can model a breadth of different systems in an HDL but have no depth into how the system is implemented in hardware. This becomes problematic when an issue arises in a real design and there is no foundational knowledge for the students to fall back on in order to debug the problem

Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with Verilog

The overall goal of this book is to fill a void that has appeared in the instruction of digital circuits over the past decade due to the rapid abstraction of system design. Up until the mid-1980s, digital circuits were designed using classical techniques. Classical techniques relied heavily on manual design practices for the synthesis, minimization, and interfacing of digital systems. Corresponding to this design style, academic textbooks were developed that taught classical digital design techniques. Around 1990, large-scale digital systems began being designed using hardware description languages (HDL) and automated synthesis tools. Broad-scale adoption of this modern design approach spread through the industry during this decade. Around 2000, hardware description languages and the modern digital design approach began to be taught in universities, mainly at the senior and graduate level. There were a variety of reasons that the modern digital design approach did not penetrate the lower levels of academia during this time. First, the design and simulation tools were difficult to use and overwhelmed freshman and sophomore students. Second, the ability to implement the designs in a laboratory setting was infeasible. The modern design tools at the time were targeted at custom integrated circuits, which are cost- and time-prohibitive to implement in a university setting. Between 2000 and 2005, rapid advances in programmable logic and design tools allowed the modern digital design approach to be implemented in a university setting, even in lower-level courses. This allowed students to learn the modern design approach based on HDLs and prototype their designs in real hardware, mainly fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs). This spurred an abundance of textbooks to be authored, teaching hardware description languages and higher levels of design abstraction. This trend has continued until today. While abstraction is a critical tool for engineering design, the rapid movement toward teaching only the modern digital design techniques has left a void for freshman- and sophomore-level courses in digital circuitry. Legacy textbooks that teach the classical design approach are outdated and do not contain sufficient coverage of HDLs to prepare the students for follow-on classes. Newer textbooks that teach the modern digital design approach move immediately into high-level behavioral modeling with minimal or no coverage of the underlying hardware used to implement the systems. As a result, students are not being provided the resources to understand the fundamental hardware theory that lies beneath the modern abstraction such as interfacing, gate-level implementation, and technology optimization. Students moving too rapidly into high levels of abstraction have little understanding of what is going on when they click the “compile and synthesize” button of their design tool. This leads to graduates who can model a breadth of different systems in an HDL but have no depth into how the system is implemented in hardware. This becomes problematic when an issue arises in a real design and there is no foundational knowledge for the students to fall back on in order to debug the problem

Integrating nano-logic into an undergraduate logic design course

The goal of this work is to motivate our students and enhance their ability to address newer logic blocks namely majority gates in the existing framework. We use a K-map based methodology to introduce a few novel nano-logic design concepts for the undergraduate logic design class. We want them to possess knowledge about a few fundamental abstracted logical behaviors of future nano-devices and their functionality which in turn would motivate them to further investigate these non-CMOS emerging devices, logics and architectures. This would augment critical thinking of the students where they apply the learnt knowledge to a novel/unfamiliar situation. We intend to augment the existing standard EE and CS courses by inserting K-map based knowledge modules on nano-logic structure for stimulating their interest without significant diversion from the course framework. Experiments with our students show that all the students were able to grasp the basic concept of majority logic synthesis and almost 63 of them had a deeper understanding of the synthesis algorithm demonstrated to them

Computerized logic design of digital circuits

Procedure performs all work required for logic design of digital counters or sequential circuits and simplification of Boolean expressions. Program provides simple, accurate, and comprehensive logic design capability to users both experienced and totally inexperienced in logic desig

Microarchitecture optimization for timing and layout

In recent years the drive to produce more complex integrated circuits while spending less design time has driven the demand for design automation tools. The search for design automation methods has resulted in the design of numerous behavioral synthesis and logic synthesis tools. This report describes a system that fills the gap between traditional behavioral synthesis and logic synthesis tools. Techniques are introduced for improving the microarchitecture structure and using feedback from lower-level optimization tools to guide design optimizations while attempting to meet user specified area and time constraints. These techniques include the capability for mixing layout styles such as custom layout for random-logic components and bit-slicing for regularly structured components. In this manner the entire design, control logic and datapath, can be optimized at the same time. Further, this paper presents a new methodology for microarchitecture-level optimization that greatly reduces the amount of technology-specific knowledge necessary to perform the optimizations

Design and implementation of fuzzy logic controllers

The main objectives of our research are to present a self-contained overview of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, develop a methodology for control system design using fuzzy logic controllers, and to design and implement a fuzzy logic controller for a real system. We first present the fundamental concepts of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. Fuzzy sets and basic fuzzy operations are defined. In addition, for control systems, it is important to understand the concepts of linguistic values, term sets, fuzzy rule base, inference methods, and defuzzification methods. Second, we introduce a four-step fuzzy logic control system design procedure. The design procedure is illustrated via four examples, showing the capabilities and robustness of fuzzy logic control systems. This is followed by a tuning procedure that we developed from our design experience. Third, we present two Lyapunov based techniques for stability analysis. Finally, we present our design and implementation of a fuzzy logic controller for a linear actuator to be used to control the direction of the Free Flight Rotorcraft Research Vehicle at LaRC