Digital Design

To master VLSI design the very first thing to understand is the basic building blocks of digital design. Once the building blocks are known and well understood, anybody can design a system for the given specifications. This section takes you through the building blocks first, then how to design an efficient system using these blocks.

Basically there are two types of digital circuits,

1. Combinational circuits.
2. Sequential circuits.

Mostly a digital system consists of both combinational and sequential circuits. So it is compulsory to understand both of them and how to use them in a design. The flow of a digital system design is as shown below,

1. Read the problem definition.(specifications).
2. Find the number of inputs and outputs required.
3. Prepare a truth table for each output in terms of one or more inputs.
4. Translate the truth table to boolean equations.
5. Minimize the boolean equations.
6. Implement the design using any HDL(Hardware Descriptive Language).

So let's go to the contents we will be discussing. This is divided into sections, the first section is for beginners in digital design however this section can be skipped for people who have taken any basic course on digital design.

Sections III and IV are very important for designing and optimizing a system for performance, throughput and robustness.

Section-I

• Boolean Algebra.
• Gate level minimization.

Section-II

• Adder and Subtractors.
• Multiplexer,Demultiplexer,Codeconverters,Decoders and Encoders.
• ROM
• Flipflop and applications.

Section-III

• System design
• Data path design.
• Control path Design and Optimization.

Section-IV

• Metastability.
• Pipelining and Parallelism.
• Power and Clock gating.