To get the full benefit from this text, students should complete all the design projects as they proceed through the chapters. The projects blend homework assignments with active design work, and reinforce the concepts covered in the text and lectures. Projects can take eight or more hours per week to complete, so it is essential that students have unrestricted access to the required CAD tools and design kits. This text is written for the Digilent Basys or Nexys2 design kits, which are low-cost design platforms that contain powerful, state-of-the-art programmable logic devices. When used with the free WebPack CAD software from Xilinx, these kits make powerful design stations that students can use in virtually any location, in or out of the lab.

This book first gives an introduction to electronic circuits: various electronic components,basic FET construction and operation. Then discusses structure of combinational logic　circuits and logic minimization, introduces several combinational circuits that are　frequently used by digital designers, including a data selector, a binary decoder, an encoder,and a shifter, also discusses several combinational circuits that perform arithmetic　operations on binary numbers, including adders, multipliers, and comparators. Finally,introduces the concept of electronic memory and the founding concepts used in the design　of sequential circuits.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Electronic Circuits

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 3. Digital Circuits

 4. Electronic Components

 5. Logic Circuits

 Exercise 1: Digital Circuits and the Basys Board

Chapter 2: Introduction to Digilent FPGA-based Boards

 Overview

 Exercise 2: Introduction to Digilent FPGA-based Boards

 Lab Project 2: Board Verification and Basic Logic Circuits

Chapter 3: Logic Circuit Structure With an Introduction to Computer Aided Design(CAD) Tools

 1. Overview

 2. Introduction to Basic Structure of Logic Circuits

 3. Introduction to Computer Aided Design Tools

 Exercise 3: Logic Circuit Structure

 Lab Project 3: Introduction to Schematic Capture

Chapter 4: Logic Minimization

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 3. Boolean Algebra

 4. Logic Graphs

 5. Incompletely Specified Logic Functions (Don't Cares)

 6. Entered Variables

 7. Computer-based Logic Minimization Algorithms

 Exercise 4: Logic Minimization

 Lab Project 4: Logic Minimization

Chapter 5: Introduction to VHDL

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 3. Introduction to VHDL

 Lab Project 5: Introduction to VHDL

Chapter 6: Combinational Circuit Blocks

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 3. Combinational Circuit Blocks

 Exercise 6: Combinational Circuit Blocks

 Lab Project 6: Combinational Circuit Blocks

Chapter 7: Combinational Arithmetic Circuits

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 3. More about VHDL

 Exercise 7: Combinational Arithmetic Circuits

 Lab Project 7: Combinational Arithmetic Circuits

Chapter 8: Signal Propagation Delays

 1. Overview

 2. Propagation Delays in Logic Circuits

 Lab Project 8: Signal Propagation Delays

Chapter 9: Basic Memory Circuits

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 Lab Project 9: Basic Memory Circuits

Chapter 10: Structural Design of Sequential Circuits

 1. Overview

 2. Background

 Exercise 10: Structural Design of Sequential Circuits

 Lab Project 10: Structural Design of Sequential Circuits