Digital Electronics Resources: Boolean Logic

Digital Electronics is basically made up of logic gates. Gates have inputs and produce outputs and these are in the form of 1s and 0s. Remember, a 1 represents an input or output of electrical current.

(For complete details on logic gates Click here.)

The advantages of using digital techniques are that the information storage is easy and accuracy is much higher. Digital Circuits are less affected by noise.

Logic Circuits can classified as follows:

Combination Logic Circuits
Building block is the logic gate.
Use AND, OR, NOT gates.

Sequential Logic Circuits
Building block is the flip flop.
Used in timing and memory devices.

Flip Flops are used to form counters, shift registers, and various memory devices.

Boolean Logic: Boolean logic is a complete system for logical operations, used in many systems. It was named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. It is the use of operators AND, OR, NOT to combine search terms.

Commutative: It is the property that changing the order of something does not change the end conclusion.

Associative : Within an expression containing two or more occurrences in a row of the same associative operator, the order in which the operations are performed does not matter as long as the sequence of the operands is not changed.

Distributive: It is also a property of binary operations.

DeMorgan's Theorems: It describes the equivalence between gates with inverted inputs and gates with inverted outputs. Simply put, a NAND gate is equivalent to a Negative-OR gate, and a NOR gate is equivalent to a Negative-AND gate.