This text covers a broad range of topics in digital system design with remarkable thoroughness. It is well laid-out, with clear typography and figures. There are a few typos, but these can be corrected by a thinking reader. The exercises at the end of the chapters are numerous and quite appropriate to the material covered. The references at the chapter ends point the way to significant papers which should be assigned as outside reading for a graduate-level course taught from this book. The only negative feature is that the index is a bit sparse.

Chapter 1, the obligatory discussion of fundamentals, presents an interesting discussion of two topics: Boolean algebra and basic logic gates. The discussion of logic gates includes a diode and transistor implementation of each basic gate. The presentation of Boolean algebra is based on a discussion of Huntington’s postulates.

Chapter 2 covers integer and fixed point arithmetic in considerable detail. It includes a brief discussion of Gray codes.

Chapter 3 introduces combinatorial circuits and develops procedures for the design of minimal circuits. The discussion of the prime implicants of a combinatorial circuit is very complete, although perhaps a bit too sophisticated for lower level undergraduates. This chapter is typical of the book in that there is a wealth of material which requires more than a casual reading to absorb.

Chapter 4 presents several more complicated combinational circuits, including parity checkers, adders, multiplexers, and decoders. The emphasis is on the tradeoff between the speed and electrical (fan-in/fan-out) considerations.

Chapters 5 and 6 present a considerable amount of good material on the design of sequential logic circuits for synchronous and asynchronous circuits, respectively. These two chapters are the real focus of the book as can be seen by the fact that they occupy just a bit less than half of the pages of this seven chapter book. The standard procedures of state tables are illustrated by several nonstandard and very interesting design problems. These two chapters conclude with an analysis of hazards in circuit design and a complete synthesis example which serves to bring together the topics previously discussed separately.

Chapter 7 introduces system level design and register transfer languages for the description of most of the main components of a digital computer. The coverage here is not as complete as in other chapters. It is obviously an introduction to the subject in preparation for a course specifically on digital computer design.

The publisher describes this book as covering “all the material of an introductory one semester undergraduate or basic graduate-level computer science or electrical engineering course in switching theory or logical design of digital systems.” In the opinion of this reviewer, the description is accurate. The only reservation about this book is that it may be too advanced for an introductory course. Certainly it would be an excellent text for a second course in digital design.