Functional Building Blocks#

This is the heart of the notebook. Everything digital — a microcontroller, an FPGA, a shift register on a hobby board — is ultimately assembled from a small set of primitives that do a handful of jobs. A gate makes a decision. A latch remembers. A counter counts. A multiplexer selects. A shift register moves data. And at the edges, analog helpers connect the discrete world back to the continuous one.

These primitives are technology-independent. The same handful of ideas recur whether they are built from relays, TTL, CMOS, or lookup tables inside a programmable device. Learning them here — as behaviors, not part numbers — is what makes the rest of the notebook read as variations on a theme rather than a catalog of unrelated chips.

Sections#

• Gates — Gates make decisions.
• Boolean Foundations — Gates obey algebra.
• Arithmetic — Gates do math.
• Storage — Gates remember.
• Counting — Hardware can count without software.
• State Machines — Hardware follows a plan.
• Selection — Hardware routes information.
• Moving Data — Hardware transports information.
• Analog Helpers — Digital systems still touch the analog world.