A First Course in Digital Systems Design: An Integrated Approach

Easily and systematically builds the "toolkit" necessary to understand and design digital circuits. The book starts with basic boolean algebra and states many useful theorems to know. Alongside this symbolic notation is pictoral schematic drawings to visual the flow of data. Each chapter builds on the previous, starting with simple logic gates (AND, OR, NOT), and then using different combinations to make combinatoral circuits. Then the book changes gears covering technical aspects of different materials used in creating circuits (i.e. CMOS). Followed with some basic electrical theory and introduces VHDL to allow designers to simulate more complicated designs and test that they work correctly. These are the necessary precursors to understanding the following topics including sequential circuits, RAM, and state machines. Finally, it is all put together by examining a simple RISC chip with a simple instruction set.

Uyemura's book is a novel approach to teaching introductory digital design, covering chip design and hardware description languages as well as the classic fundamentals. Although most large digital systems are built on integrated circuits today, IC design was often put off until graduate-level courses. This book does a good job of presenting modern digital design theory and practice in under 500 pages.The biggest drawback, IMHO, is that the book is overpriced for a thin introductory textbook. I would like to use it in conjunction with Patterson and Hennessy for an undergraduate computer engineering course, but am concerned about making students purchase two expensive books.