Introduction to Digital Electronics

Digital electronics is one of the fundamental courses found in all electrical

engineering and most science programs. The great variety of LabVIEW

Boolean and numeric controls/indicators, together with the wealth of

programming structures and functions, make LabVIEW an excellent tool to

visualize and demonstrate many of the fundamental concepts of digital

electronics. The inherent modularity of LabVIEW is exploited in the same

way that complex digital integrated circuits are built from circuits of less

complexity, which in turn are built from fundamental gates. This manual

is designed as a teaching resource to be used in the classroom as

demonstrations, in tutorial sessions as collaborative studies, or in the

laboratory as interactive exercises.

The order of the labs follows most electronic textbooks. The first six labs

cover the fundamental circuits of gates, encoders, binary addition,

D-latches, ring counters, and JK flip-flops. Many of the VIs are suitable for

both classroom demonstration and laboratory exploration.

The second set of six labs cover advanced topics such as DACs, ADCs,

seven-segment displays, serial communication, and the CPU. These are best

done in the context of a digital electronics lab, comparing the LabVIEW

simulations with real integrated circuits. In each case, you can enhance

simulations presented in the text by using a National Instruments DAQ

board to interact with the real world through LabVIEW digital I/O, analog

out, analog in, and serial VIs.

Labs 2, 5, and 12 are application oriented and are designed to demonstrate

encoding schemes, digital encryption, and the operation of a CPU. These

labs could be presented as challenging problems in a tutorial setting or in a

workshop environment.

The labs can also be grouped to demonstrate special relationships of

advanced devices on certain basic gates. For example, the CPU operation is

dependent on the concept of registers and two input operations.

This manual includes a complete set of LabVIEW VIs. The text is also

included on the CD so that you can customize the material.