Welcome to ECE/CS3700: a course that is introduces fundamental
concepts of how digital circuits are designed. All of you have heard
cliche's such as "the digital age", "information revolution",
"info-com/digital economy", etc. This course will enable you to make
these drawing-room cliche's into a reality. Now-a-days, every
household item from coffee machines to DVD-players to flight-control
of an airplane (oops!, not a household item) has a digital logic
circuit inside it. This course will teach you WHAT type of designs can
be (and should be) designed using digital logic concepts, and HOW to
design them. What advantages do Digital circuits have over their
analogue counterparts? Of course, they do have some limitations as
well - so what are they?  This course will tell you all about it.

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Behind any engineering system is an efficient model that allows to
analyze (and optimize) its characteristics. Digital circuits can also
be easily modeled using concepts such as Boolean algebra. Hence
Boolean algebra is a fundamantal part of this course. This algebra
allows to make Logical decisions, analyses and optimizations over a
digital design so as to make it function correctly and robustly. This
is something that you will learn in this course.

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Secondly, this course is about designing systems. "Design" is really
both a science and an art. The science is, of course, written in the
books. But how to interpret that science and transform it into a
functioning product is an art - something that you learn only by
experience. Hence, this course will have a significant portion of
design-work, both via HWs and Laboratory experiments. 

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Finally, the course will be taught through a Computer-Aided Design
(CAD) perspective. Over the past 2 decades, the digital-design and CAD
communities have made significant advances in automatic modeling,
simulation and synthesis tools that enable design of large scale
digital systems. We will use one such set of modeling language
(Verilog Hardware Description Language) and toolset (Xilinx FPGA
synthesis tools) --- widely used in industry!

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It is really a fun course: you will put into practise the concepts of
counting digits (Digital) in a common-sensical way (LOGIC) and build
an electrical system that would be able to perform varied computations
(DESIGN). More formally, you will learn how to describe digital
designs, minimize the underlying combinational logic functions, build
and optimize sequential circuits via state diagrams, and finally
implement your designs in conventional state-of-the-art technologies
(field programmable gate arrays).

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I hope you'll have fun studying it, and I'll have fun teaching it. The
course is not very difficult, but it moves very quickly, the labs, HW,
exams are all a bit hectic, so if you miss a couple of lectures and/or
HW/labs, it can be hard to catch-up. Attend classes regularly, & I
think you'll do fine...