| This book will help the electronics experimenter understand and use the low-cost
digital integrated circuits now available for practical, everyday electronics
projects. The material presented attempts to shatter the myth that digital IC's
are too expensive, too complex, or too awesome to use intelligently in simple
circuits. In addition, this book shows the technician the why of digital IC's-how they work, how to use them, and how to design with them. It tells how digital instruments work and how to design and build your own fully integrated IC systems. Also, this book should be valuable to the engineer who is tired of wading through a stack of application notes and pre-IC computer books to try to find realistic and reasonable designs for such things as divide-by-n scalers, low-cost decimal counter/readouts, IC monostables, synchronizers, or other circuits. The three chapters on counting flip-flops, divide-by-n counting, and decimal counting provide circuits virtually ready to drop into systems for immediate use. The reasons this book deals entirely with Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL) are the relatively low prices of this digital-IC line, the ease with which it can be understood, and the ease with which it can be interfaced with conventional transistor circuitry. The book is organized into two parts, with Chapters 1 through 4 covering the more basic aspects of RTL, and Chapters 5 through 8 dealing with the more exotic RTL applications. Chapter 1 contains elementary nomenclature, and discusses power-supply considerations, mounting, construction practices, etc. Chapter 2 has to do with logic, decoders, logic functions, and the methods of coupling RTL to the outside world. Chapter 3 is on multivibrators; it tells how to build square-wave generators, pulse shapers, astables, monostables, and bistables. The next chapter concerns biasing RTL gates into their amplifying region and building such things as crystal oscillators, operational amplifiers, dc instrument amplifiers, and comparators. This chapter includes "instant-design" charts for speedy amplifier specification. Duty-cycle integration techniques, useful in tachometers and frequency discriminators, are covered in this chapter, also. Chapter 5 has to do with the JK and Type-D flip-flops, the eight basic JK flip-flop configurations, and some counter techniques. Here, we also look at the input and output restrictions on counting flip-flops, and investigate the techniques essential for reliable and predictable operation. Chapter 6 is on divide-by-n counting and scaling-how to build reliable, frequency independent, low-cost dividers, decoders, counters, and steppers for any desired count. Decimal counters are given thorough coverage in Chapter 7. The final chapter is on digital instruments. It shows how to tie together the circuits in the rest of the book to build frequency counters, digital voltmeters, electronic stop watches, and other complete digital systems. I wish to extend my thanks to Billy G. Wood and Rudy O. Nonnenmann for their technical and proofing assistance in putting this book together. DON LANCASTER AddendumIt is rare for any technical book written in 1968 to still be in
demand-especially a book on integrated circuits. Apparently, we have a classic
of sorts on our hands. Your response to this book so far has generated the
continuing series of Cookbooks-RTL, TTL, Active Filters, TV Typewriter, CMOS,
and the related Users Guide to TTL. |