Digital electronics

Chapter objectives
When you have finished this chapter you should be able to: handle combinational logic design using a truth table; understand Karnaugh maps and logic design; understand combinational logic modules such as the half adder, the full adder, multiplexers, and decoders; understand sequential logic modules such as the S-R flip-flop, the D flip-flop, and the J-K flip-flop; understand sequential logic design; understand data registers, counters, the Schmitt trigger, the 555 timer, the astable multivibrator, and the one-shot monostable multivibrator.

4.1 Introduction
Analog signals have a continuous range of values within some specified limits and can be associated with continuous physical phenomena. On the other hand, digital signals typically assume only two discrete values (states) and are appropriate for any phenomena involving counting or integer numbers. While we are mostly dealing with voltages and currents at specific points in analog circuits, we are interested in the information flow in digital circuits. The active elements in digital circuits are either BJTs or FETs (already discussed in Chapter 3). These transistors are designed to operate in only two states ('on' and 'off), which normally correspond to two output voltages. Hence the transistors act as switches. The two digital states can be given various names: ON/OFF, true/false, high/low, or 1/0. The 1 and 0 notation naturally leads to the use of binary (base 2) numbers. Octal

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100 Mechatronics (base 8) and hexadecimal (base 16) numbers are also often used since they provide a condensed number notation. Decimal (base 10) numbers are not of much use in digital electronics. Before going into the details of digital circuits and systems, we will first review number systems and Boolean algebra.

4.2 Number systems

We are accustomed to using a decimal system for most of our mathematical computations. This is a base ten system, in which each digit of a number represents a power of 10. Consider the decimal number abc. We can write this as abcio = (a x 102) + ( 6 x 101) + (c x 10) (4.1) For example, the number 789.45 can be expressed as: (7 x 102) + (8 x 101) + (9 x 10) + (4 x 10" 1) + (5 x 10"2). This format can be rewritten more generally by assigning the digits 7, 8, 9, 4, and 5 to the expressions D(2), D(l), D(0), D ( - l ) , and D(-2), respectively. The numbers in parentheses are the same as the exponents of the powers of ten they correspond to. We can also express the base, in this case, 10, as r. These substitutions give us the following expression: [D(2) x r2] + [D(l) x r1] + [D(0) x r] + [D(-l) x r"1] + [D(-2) x r " 2 ]. We now have a generalization for expressing numbers of any base r in terms of a power series. Using this generalization, we can convert from any base to decimal (or any other if you can readily add and take exponents in that base). For example, we can find the decimal value of 325.02 3 as follows: [3 x 32] + [2 x 31] + [5 x 3] + [0x 3" 1] + [2 x 3"2] = (3 x 9) + (2 x 3) + (5 x 1) + (0 x 1/3) + (2x 1/9) = 27 + 6 + 5 + 2/9 = 38.22

4.2.1 Binary numbers

The binary number system is a base 2 number system, using only the digits 0 and 1. It is commonly used when dealing with computers because it is well suited to