During the past few decades, astronomical progress has been made in computer and related technologies. This phenomenal advancement can be fundamentally attributed to the developments in digital logic design and integrated circuits. There are a plethora of texts on digital design and yet this book by Harris and Harris stands out from the crowd as it addresses more contemporary matters of interest for digital logic design, without missing the technical rigor.

Within a very short space, this book touches on three different aspects of digital logic design, namely: the fundamentals of logic design, hardware description languages, and the design of bigger and complex logic circuits and computer architectures. The first three chapters introduce the foundation of digital logic design, including Boolean algebra, combinational logic design, and sequential logic design.

The fourth chapter provides a quick but critically important look at hardware description languages (HDLs), specifically SystemVerilog and VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL). What is remarkable here is the authors’ dexterity to show the samples/example designs in both of the languages side by side. It gives readers a comparative understanding of these two HDLs, and may help them to opt for a specific one. This is indeed a confusing matter for beginners as they start to learn the subtleties of HDLs. The authors’ notes are to the point and address many of the subtle language-specific matters within this brief but comprehensive chapter.

Chapter 5 discusses the building blocks for complex circuits such as arithmetic logic circuits and memories. Chapter 6 is a big, ambitious chapter, covering assembly languages and programming with a focus on ARM processors. It might be a little difficult to grasp for someone without a background in assembly programming, linking, and loading of routines. Chapter 6 finishes with a brief history of the ARM evolution and some peculiarities of x86 complex instruction set computing (CISC) machines. Chapter 7 depicts how to build a complete microprocessor using microarchitectures for its own operations. The separate modules, such as arithmetic logic units (ALUs), memory, register files, program counters, and controllers, are gradually connected to show how they fit in the overall design of a complex microprocessor. Readers will surely be amused that this surprisingly simple and half-page design is all that is present at the heart of modern million-transistor microprocessors (though most of it is attributed to the memory/non-executive part of the processor). Finally, chapters 8 and 9 (9 is available online) cover the memory hierarchies and input/output (I/O) systems of modern computers.

In short, this excellent book covers a wide spectrum of digital design and computer architecture and organization. Starting with a humble introduction, it goes deep into the individual topics. Given the breadth of the topic and the depth of materials and their contemporary depictions, it will be a necessary book for many digital design enthusiasts in the years to come.

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