Customer Reviews

Contemporary Logic Design (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a sound, competent introduction to the elements of contemporary logic design. It covers all the basics: boolean logic, gate implementations, and the elements of binary arithmetic. It talks about minimization techniques, logic delays, and some of the classic logic implementation technologies (PLAs, decoders, muxes). It gives the basics of common notation, including timing diagrams, gate-level schematics, and so on. The last few chapters discuss synchronous (clocked) design and design of state machines, including standard reduction techniques. All the basics of modern design are there. A good student will start to see the number of different ways any problem can be solved, and start to recongize that no one perspective will solve all problems, at least not well.

Asynchronous logic, based on stable states of combinational circuits with feedback, is one of the topics skipped. That's still important in the interior of flip-flops and in niche application areas, but asynchronous design certainly not in the main stream any more. Likewise, the authors skip over transistor-level design (mostly), the oddities of J-K flops, and most discussion of discrete or MSI logic. Well, that makes sense. Most logic these days is implemented in PALs (which are covered) or larger-scale devices. 7400-level devices have pretty much gone the way of relays and tubes - of historical interest, mostly. Remember that this is "Contemporary" logic, and those aren't big concerns in the daily work of most contemporary logic designers.

There are other omissions that make sense for a first-term course. Hardware description languages (e.g. Verilog or VHDL) are barely mentioned; they're critical in daily practice, but may not be useful until students have mastered this book's level. Micro-sequencers might also be a bit advanced for this presentation, despite their usefulness and their conceptual importance in later courses. More complex design examples would have helped, but would probably have started making bad assumptions about tools available to the student. Sticking to simple problems, however, may not prepare the student for systems of realistic complexity. Some of the omissions really don't do the student any favors. When logic design is so separate from other kinds of circuit design, students come away with a critical lack of understanding of how logic fits into a whole system. There's just no mention of signal integrity, drive strength, power consumption, jitter and skew, interfacing, or all the points where logic hits the rest of the world. Nothing in this book prepares a student for reading a standard spec sheet, let alone reading between its lines. I can only hope that instructors using this book make up for some of those deficiencies in supplementary material or in the lab.

The authors have chosen a range of topics to cover, and have covered it with workman-like competence. It's good as far as it goes. My only problem is that it doesn't go into the second semester, into the underlying technology (or not much), or very far into the real world.

//wiredweird

The very fact that several major universities use Contemporary Logic Design for their introductory digital logic design courses is a recommendation in itself; having taken just such a course using this book, I found both the 'lightweight' examples excellent for breaking new intellectual ground, and the 'in depth' example projects, developed from the initial specification, through all phases of design, and into the final implementation, often with resultant waveforms, to provide the much needed feel of the effort involved in a real design project. A perfect introductory text for anyone interested in circuit logic design.

When I was going to school at Berkeley I took Mr. Katz's course in logic design (CS150). This book was only in manuscript form at the time, but I found it easy to read and very practical. Now four years out of school, and immersed in the field, I find myself still referring back to it from time to time. That is the mark of a great textbook.

This book is really well written. Not only is it comprehensive, but it is written in the active tense, and addresses the reader as "you", and talks about "we", etc. This is a big plus in book writing, as too many authors were incorrectly taught that they should write extremely difficult to read texts that are impersonal and unnatural to read (thus distracting the readers from focusing on the material, and instead spending most of their energy on decoding the text).

Mr. Katz knows how to write in a style that is efficient for the reader. His book is well organized, has nice graphics, great examples with accompanying graphically laid out solutions, and great illustrations.

Whenever i look for books, i make sure they have these qualities:
1) Pictures. Face it, w/ the possible exception of the blind, humans think visually. If you can't think of it visually, you won't learn it well.
2) Clarity. Don't waste time struggling with the text. You need that energy to struggle with the MATERIAL itself.
3) Examples. You don't just want example problems where you must do 90% of the work, when the author leaves out the most important and difficult steps. You want examples that really illustrate the the topic of interest while also reinforcing previous topics that are involved in the example.

Katz' book has all of these features. It is no wonder he won the Distinguished Teacher Award. This is the finest textbook i've used in college so far.

Some reviewers have difficulty with the material itself, and perhaps unduly blamed Katz, but i believe an objective analysis of textbook writing will prove that Katz is a very fine author, and this is a very fine book.

I got this book for a Circuits course. The book is hard to get and incredibly convoluted in a large amount of BS. Hey -- here is an idea?!?!

Here is a circuit.... here is how it works.... this is called that...

When someone is learning new material, call the device the same thing you called it before. If you call it something else, make that transition clear.

EE people can not write books for the life of them, even though they are smarter than God.

Obviously EE and perhaps ECE guys would disagree with me, but that's because the book confirms what they already knew.

As far as material and explanations, the book is great. I just have no tolerance for the countless number of grammatical errors it contains. At least one on every page. Granted, we are engineering majors, but it's a university-level textbook!

Loved the book- all the way through. This was a required text at UC Berkeley College of Engineering for the 5 unit, upper division class I took there in my final semester of my senior year.

Not only was the book helpful to support the lecture notes and problem sets, it was also very helpful while I was designing one of the biggest projects I've ever done.

Clear, concise, well done Professor Katz!

I received the book in reasonably good condition ...The delivery was prompt and i received the book within 2 weeks . I am looking forward to buying more books from the same vendor

For my 2nd semester Intro to Logic Systems course I was required to use this book. It was the most frustrating academic experience of my life.

This book is almost completely devoid of any rational explanations to help students with the problems given in the back of the book. Whether it's simplifying boolean equations, 2-bit adders, counters, etc. this book provides very poor explanations of the theory behind how these things are supposed to work, and most of the time doesn't give any worthwhile examples in the chapters that would help with doing the book's homework problems or any related problem in a class. The only parts of this book that I found helpful were the sections on truth tables, binary addition and subtraction, and base conversions, but that's mainly because those subjects are inherently very simple and easy to figure out compared to being asked to simplify a 32:1 multiplexer into a 4:1 when you've barely started learning the basics of what multiplexers are. It's as though the author thinks that because he's known these fundamental topics for years that an EE student who has never been exposed to logic systems should be able to learn everything right off the bat through poor explanations, complete lack of examples, and convoluted chapters that have sections that oftentimes seem barely relevant to preceding ones.

I feel that there are probably much better textbooks out there that are put by the wayside because of textbooks like this one which have been established for years and are therefore exempt from serious critique from colleges that base their curriculum off of it. If you have the misfortune of having to use this textbook in your courses, I'd try and find a better one to learn from and just do whatever work is required for this and then avoid it like the plague.

supposedly, this book is the standard for logic design in undergrad courses, but i found a couple of things really difficult about this text.

1) lack of examples
2) poor printing quality

for the price, i'd expected a bit better.