Digital Systems Design

Learning Outcomes

This course provides students with foundational knowledge in Logic Design, serving as the basis for the comprehension and analysis of the structural principles underlying digital electronic systems. Through this framework, students are equipped to engage critically with the broader scientific domain of digital design, with a balanced emphasis on both theoretical concepts and practical implementation aspects, including the design and analysis of combinational and sequential logic circuits.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be in position to:

• Perform numerical calculations in numerical systems and representation standards which are typical in the computer architecture domain.
• Understand and apply the fundamental concepts of Boolean Algebra and logical operations.
• Design and implement logic functions using logic gates and minimization techniques.
• Identify whether a circuit is combinational or sequential.
• Analyze a given sequential circuit and design/compose a sequential circuit that implements a finite state machine.

Design, optimize, analyze and implement complex logic and synchronous sequential circuits using various building blocks (gates, SSI/MSI integrated circuits, multiplexers, flip-flops etc.).

Course Content

The main objective of the course is the familiarization of the students with the binary arithmetic and logic, the digital design methodologies and the basic architectural characteristics and structure of a computer system.

More specifically, the course content is the following:
1. Introduction: Digital systems history.
2. Numerical systems: binary, octal, hexadecimal, conversions from one system to the other.
3. Binary arithmetic operations, use of complements, binary codes.
4. Logic Gates, Boolean algebra.
5. Standard and Non-Standard Forms of Binary Functions (Terms, sums, products, SOP and POS forms, canonical terms, minterms and maxterms, Equivalence between truth tables and canonical sums and products, Conversions between canonical forms and complementary functions)
6. Truth tables, Karnaugh charts, examples of logic circuits design, design with NAND/NOR gates, SSI/MSI circuits, multiplexers and decoders.
7. Introduction to the synchronous sequential circuits, Flip – Flops (D, T, RS και JK-type)
8. Methodology for designing and analyzing synchronous sequential circuits.
9. Design of Counters – Registers (parallel/serial input) and Shift Registers – multi-function registers.

Suggested bibliography:

Nikolos, D. (2017). Computer Architecture. P. Papakonstantinou Publications (In Greek).

Mano, M. (2018). Digital Design. Papasotiriou Publications.

Nelson Victor P., Nagle H. Troy,Irwin J. David, Carroll Bill D, Digital Logic Circuit Analysis and Design.

Dally William, Harting Curtis, Digital Design.

Morris Mano, Charles R. Kime, Tom Martin, Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals.

-Related scientific journals:

IEEE Transactions on Computers