Digital electronics design (MFDIGTL & LBYMF2F)

TARGET AUDIENCE: Self, Students, Academics, Industry Professionals, Employers, and Tech Enthusiasts

Note: This contains notes and slides I have got from this class. putting it here for my own future reference :”>

OVERVIEW: Digital electronics design has been the heart of innovation for the advancement of technology from our personal computer to that of smart wearable devices. Therefore, for MEM students and professionals that aim to have ajob within this industry, it is paramount to learn the basics of digital systems. Below covers the lecture and laboratory that I did for this course.

LECTURE:

The lecture covered boolean algebra and expression like that of the dreaded Karnaugh map to simplify logic gates; combinational and sequential circuits and state machines. Digital logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR) are introduced as the physical implementations of Boolean functions. This was extended to combinational logic circuits, including adders (half and full), comparators, encoders, decoders, multiplexers, and demultiplexers, detailing their functions and applications.

What I find the most confusing was the multiplexer. Based on the lecture, “A multiplexer is a circuit used to select and route any one of the several input signals to a single output,” and I did try to make a final paper out of this which failed horribly 😅. Sequential circuits, which incorporate storage elements like latches and flip-flops, are then explored, differentiating between SR, D, JK, and T flip-flops. “A sequential circuit may use many flip - flops to store as many bits as necessary,” emphasizing the memory aspect of these circuits.

Lastly state machines were discussed but I never really understand that too. The Mealy and Moore definitions for the state of the machine operation is mentioned to be utilized for gate-level minimization along with K-mapping with Don’t care condition. If there is one thing that this taught me is that the best digital design is the one with the least logic gate used to achieve the desired function of the machine :))

Below is a consolidated document of the calculations that I did for this lecture. As well as PPT slides that I got from the instructor at the time.

Lastly, here is our sort of failed attempt to understand multiplexers where we envisioned its use for indoor air quality index determination as sample in real-life. We never really got to the bottom of this since we never had experimental results for this basis and limited discussion on the calibration of the MQ3 sensor that we done. Overall, it was solely basing of the theory behind multiplexers which was even sketchy from the very beginning

LABORATORY:

The laboratory supplemented the teachings from the lecture class where we were handled to plan, simulate then prototype the gate simulations using an Arduino Uno and the integrated circuit (IC) in a breadboard. I still remember where I had to ride the train to Carriedo Station and walk around Quiapo to buy our needed IC’s in DEECO physically since the nearest electronics shop e-Gizmo ran out of stock.

The laboratory instructor (at the time), was very strict in terms of documentation too so, our reports will be lengthy reaching 50 pages average for pictures and a full documentation of the truth tables, wirings and analysis. We got to have hands-on experience on the following concepts: logic gates and schmitt trigger; boolean algebra implementation; adders and subtractors; comparators, multiplexers and decoders; latches and flip-flops. The simulations and wirings were done under TinkerCAD and CircuitVerse simulator.

Below is the consolidated reports that we did as synthesis for these learnings.

REFLECTIONS:

NOTE: Reflections revisited after capstone completions

Although this class was a fun class for me at the time since I want to land a prospective job doing electronic work, I realized how I shot myself in the foot at this point of time thinking that this is a solid skill that can land me a job in the future and will be a bit helpful at least in my capstone implementation.

First error is that wiring and modelling softwares have already a dedicated industry-standard software like KiCAD or Altium Designer to create printed circuit boards (PCBs) instead of soldering the components manually (duh). Maybe also the fact that wirings in industrial automation is also totally different and you need dedicated software to do the representations usually in electrical AutoCAD. Lastly, many employers want embedded developers who mastered doing embedded systems programming done in C/C++. Particularly the use of communication protocols like I2C, SPI and CAN gives you the edge in the market.

This was a hard pill to swallow since I had to upskill to meet this requirements for the job. Although, this was certainly helped us learn the fundamentals, its too basic and irrelevant in the current job if the target is to have job-ready students after a 3-month bootcamp on digital electronics design.

Overall, I realized that you should really align self to the job that you want to take in the future. Majority of my batchmates, I feel, does not want to go into technical work in this field but that is because embedded systems is a niche that the college department never really thought we will explore in the future and just want it to be something we know of. With this in mind, I start my journey of going deep into embedded systems with this knowledge and my aim to upskill further for more opened doors and opportunities!!

PS. Shoutout to Ins for being there in the labs 100% all the way!