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Boolean Logic

-How Boolean Logic Works

Have you ever wondered how a computer can do something like balance a check book, or play chess, or spell-check a document? These are things that, just a few decades ago, only humans could do. Now computers do them with apparent ease. How can a "chip" made up of silicon and wires do something that seems like it requires human thought?

Listing Last Modified: Tue Jun 14 2005

 


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Flip Flops

One of the more interesting things that you can do with Boolean gates is to create memory with them. If you arrange the gates correctly, they will remember an input value. This simple concept is the basis of RAM (random access memory) in computers, and also makes it possible to create a wide variety of other useful circuits.

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Implementing Gates

In the previous sections we saw that, by using very simple Boolean gates, we can implement adders, counters, latches and so on. That is a big achievement, because not so long ago human beings were the only ones who could do things like add two numbers together. With a little work, it is not hard to design Boolean circuits that implement subtraction, multiplication, division... You can see that we are not that far away from a pocket calculator. From there, it is not too far a jump to the full-blown CPUs used in computers.

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Simple Adders

In the article on bits and bytes, you learned about binary addition. In this section, you will learn how you can create a circuit capable of binary addition using the gates described in the previous section.

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Simple Gates

There are three, five or seven simple gates that you need to learn about, depending on how you want to count them (you will see why in a moment). With these simple gates you can build combinations that will implement any digital component you can imagine. These gates are going to seem a little dry here, and incredibly simple, but we will see some interesting combinations in the following sections that will make them a lot more inspiring. If you have not done so already, reading How Bits and Bytes Work would be helpful before proceeding.

Listing Last Modified: Tue Jun 14 2005

 


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