Trace the field from relays and vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, microprocessors, FPGAs, and modern systems on chip. The goal is to see why today’s design methods, tools, and constraints exist.

Use truth tables, Boolean operators, and simple algebra to describe what a circuit should do before building it. You will translate everyday conditions into precise logic.

Build logic from NOT, AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR gates. You will connect symbols, equations, and physical meaning so a circuit diagram starts to feel readable.

Reduce logic with Boolean identities, Karnaugh maps, and practical simplification habits. Smaller logic often means lower cost, less delay, and fewer places for mistakes.

Create useful decision circuits such as multiplexers, demultiplexers, encoders, decoders, comparators, and priority logic. These blocks appear constantly in processors, buses, memory systems, and controllers.

Design adders, subtractors, incrementers, comparators, shifters, multipliers, and a small ALU. You will connect number representation to the circuits that calculate with it.

Read and draw block diagrams, gate-level schematics, timing sketches, and signal names that other designers can follow. Clear diagrams become a practical thinking tool, not just documentation.

Build latches and flip-flops from feedback, then use them to store one bit reliably. This chapter marks the shift from circuits that only react to inputs to circuits that remember the past.

Handle clock period, propagation delay, setup time, hold time, skew, and timing margins. You will see why a correct logic equation can still fail if timing is wrong.

Create registers, counters, timers, shift registers, and simple sequence generators. These are the everyday storage and movement parts of digital systems.

Design finite state machines using state diagrams, transition tables, encodings, and output logic. You will build controllers that step through real procedures safely and predictably.

Separate a design into datapath and control so larger systems stay organized. You will combine registers, arithmetic, multiplexers, and state machines into working hardware.

Account for fanout, loading, input thresholds, output drive, power, heat, and unused pins. These details connect clean logic diagrams to hardware that works on a real board.

Write synthesizable hardware in an HDL such as Verilog, SystemVerilog, or VHDL. You will describe combinational logic, sequential logic, modules, parameters, and clean interfaces without writing software by mistake.

Run simulations, inspect waveforms, and build testbenches that prove a design behaves as intended. You will practice catching design mistakes before they reach a board or chip.

Use constraints, pin assignments, clocks, synthesis, placement, routing, and bitstreams to put a design onto an FPGA. A small project ties HDL to buttons, LEDs, clocks, and real I/O pins.

See how synthesis turns HDL into gates, registers, memories, and technology-specific resources. You will write code that tools can map cleanly instead of code that simulates but cannot become hardware.

Read timing reports, find critical paths, add pipeline registers, adjust constraints, and fix setup or hold problems. This is where a design becomes fast enough to meet its clock target.

Design safe reset schemes and move signals between unrelated clocks without random failures. You will use synchronizers, handshakes, asynchronous FIFOs, and reset timing checks.

Use register files, ROMs, RAMs, block RAM, caches, FIFOs, and memory maps. You will choose storage structures based on size, speed, ports, latency, and how data flows through the system.

Connect devices with UART, SPI, I2C, simple parallel buses, streaming interfaces, and AXI-style handshakes. You will design both the logic and the timing discipline needed for reliable communication.

Build a tiny processor from an instruction set, register file, ALU, control unit, memory interface, and program counter. This makes the relationship between digital design and computer architecture concrete.

Speed up hardware with pipelining, parallel units, retiming, buffering, and throughput planning. You will reason about latency, hazards, stalls, and resource tradeoffs.

Use linting, formatting, version control, code review, issue tracking, and continuous integration for HDL projects. These habits make hardware work safer when a team and toolchain grow.

Go beyond hand-written tests with assertions, coverage, constrained-random testing, scoreboards, and reusable verification components. You will see why serious chips often spend more effort on verification than on design.

Prove properties such as safety, reachability, mutual exclusion, and protocol correctness with formal tools. Formal methods are especially useful for control logic, arbiters, FIFOs, and security-sensitive blocks.

Plan for observability and repair using JTAG, scan chains, built-in self-test, trace buffers, logic analyzers, and FPGA debug cores. You will diagnose failures that simulation did not catch.

Reduce energy with clock gating, power gating, operand isolation, voltage and frequency choices, and activity-aware design. You will judge power as a design requirement alongside area, speed, and correctness.

Follow the ASIC path from requirements and RTL to synthesis, verification, floorplanning, timing signoff, tapeout, fabrication, packaging, and bring-up. This chapter gives the whole chip-making workflow in one connected pass.

Place logic, route wires, build clock trees, analyze congestion, and close timing in physical silicon. You will see how layout decisions affect speed, power, area, and manufacturability.

Protect hardware against side channels, fault injection, insecure debug ports, malicious modifications, and supply-chain risk. You will design with trust, keys, boot flow, and lifecycle control in mind.

Use high-level synthesis to turn C, C++, or similar descriptions into hardware blocks when the problem fits. You will compare productivity gains against timing, area, verification, and control over the generated design.

Use RISC-V cores, open bus standards, open-source IP, and community EDA flows where they make sense. This chapter covers the shift toward more transparent and customizable hardware ecosystems.

Design datapaths for filters, transforms, matrix operations, neural network layers, and streaming sensor data. You will apply fixed-point arithmetic, parallelism, memory bandwidth planning, and FPGA or ASIC acceleration choices.

Handle multi-die systems, interposers, high-speed die-to-die links, memory stacks, and partitioning choices. Chiplets change digital design by moving some system problems from one big die into a package-level architecture.

Follow a realistic project from request to requirements, architecture, RTL, verification, FPGA prototype, timing closure, documentation, release, and hardware bring-up. The focus is making decisions in the order practicing designers face them.

Map the field’s roles, including RTL design, verification, FPGA engineering, ASIC physical design, DFT, validation, architecture, and EDA. You will plan portfolio projects, interviews, certifications or degrees when useful, and ways to keep up with tools and standards.