Digital electronic circuits are the engines of cell phones, MPEG players, digital cameras, com puters, data servers, personal digital devices, GPS displays, and many other consumer prod ucts that process and use information in a digital format. This book presents a basic treatment of digital circuits and the fundamental concepts used in their design. It is suitable for use as a textbook in an introductory course in an electrical engineering, computer engineering, or com puter science curriculum.

Each significant advance in industry practice ultimately works its way into the engineering curriculum. Since the mid-1980 s, the use of computer-based design tools has transformed the electronics industry worldwide. Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) arc designed today by using a hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL. to write a behavioral model of the circuit's functionality, and then synthesizing that description into a hardware realization in a particular technology, e.g., CMOS integrated circuits or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). No longer a novelty, these design tools are now readily available to universities, and are migrating in a strategic way from graduate level curricula into undergraduate courses. It is clear that HDLs have an essential, significant role in educat ing our future engineers. Learning to design with an HDL is as important to today's students, we think, as oscilloscopes, breadboards, and logic analyzers were to previous generations of engineers, so this edition of the text adds more weight to the use of hardware description lan guages in designing digital circuits.