This book, devoted to the design of logic circuits, has three parts. Part I, on combinational circuits, has the following chapters: “Logic variables and events”; “Switching devices”; “Elementary logic functions”; “Normal forms”; “Karnaugh maps”; “Adjacency and consensus”; “Algebraic minimisation”; “Design by composition”. Part II, entitled “Latches”, includes: “Basic theory of latches”; “Designing feedback latches”; “Elementary latches”; “Latch composition”; while Part III, “Asynchronous circuits”, contains “Word-recognition tree”; “Huffman’s flow table”; “State-encoding by iterative catenation”; “Circuit analysis”; “State reduction”; and “Verifying a logic design”. A glossary gives explanations and the informal meanings for the most common notions in the book. A short bibliography and an index of basic terms accompany the text. Each chapter contains many figures and examples.
The presentation is not theoretical, in that most proofs have been omitted, hopefully making the text more readable, but there is still enough algebraic content. Many of the methods and procedures are reworked and rewritten versions, some of them greatly improved and expanded, relatively to the previous book by the same author [Switching theory. Insight through predicate logic. Berlin: Springer (2004; Zbl 1246.94008)]. For example, the major achievement, presented in Chapter 9, is to find a time-independent description of memory making it possible to use logic in its conventional form (not, temporal logic) in working with latches and putting the theory of latches on a new footing.