Summary

This chapter began with an introduction to the properties of electrical circuits and showed how components such as voltage sources, resistors, and wires are represented in circuit diagrams. The transistor was introduced, with a focus on its use as a switching element in digital circuits. The NOT gate and the AND gate were constructed from transistors and resistors. Additional types of logic gates were defined and truth tables were presented for each device. Logic gates were used to construct more complex digital circuits, including latches, flip-flops, registers, and adders. The concept of sequential logic was introduced, and its applicability to processor design was discussed. Finally, hardware description languages were introduced and a 4-bit adder example was presented in VHDL.

You should now understand basic digital circuit concepts and the design tools used in the development of modern processors. The next chapter will expand upon these building blocks to explore...