Digital Logic Gates
Digital Logic Gates
A Digital Logic Gate is an electronic circuit which makes logical decisions based on the
combination of digital signals present on its inputs
A digital logic gate can have more than one input, for example, inputs A, B, C, D etc.,
but generally only have one digital output, (Q). Individual logic gates can be
connected or cascaded together to form a logic gate function with any desired number
of inputs, or to form combinational and sequential type circuits, or to produce differnt
logic gate functions from standard gates.
Standard commercially available digital logic gates are available in two basic families
or forms, TTL which stands for Transistor-Transistor Logic such as the 7400 series,
and CMOS which stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Silicon which is the 4000
series of chips. This notation of TTL or CMOS refers to the logic technology used to
manufacture the integrated circuit, (IC) or a “chip” as it is more commonly called.
Moore’s Law
In 1965, Gordon Moore co-founder of the Intel corporation predicted that “The
number of transistors and resistors on a single chip will double every 18 months”
regarding the development of semiconductor gate technology. When Gordon Moore
made his famous comment way back in 1965 there were approximately only 60
individual transistor gates on a single silicon chip or die.
The worlds first microprocessor in 1971 was the Intel 4004 that had a 4-bit data bus
and contained about 2,300 transistors on a single chip, operating at about 600kHz.
Today, the Intel Corporation have placed a staggering 1.2 Billion individual transistor
gates onto its new Quad-core i7-2700K Sandy Bridge 64-bit microprocessor chip
operating at nearly 4GHz, and the on-chip transistor count is still rising, as newer
faster microprocessors and micro-controllers are developed.
Most digital logic gates and digital logic systems use “Positive logic”, in which a
logic level “0” or “LOW” is represented by a zero voltage, 0v or ground and a logic
level “1” or “HIGH” is represented by a higher voltage such as +5 volts, with the
switching from one voltage level to the other, from either a logic level “0” to a “1” or
a “1” to a “0” being made as quickly as possible to prevent any faulty operation of the
logic circuit.
There also exists a complementary “Negative Logic” system in which the values and
the rules of a logic “0” and a logic “1” are reversed but in this tutorial section about
digital logic gates we shall only refer to the positive logic convention as it is the most
commonly used.
In standard TTL (transistor-transistor logic) IC’s there is a pre-defined voltage range
for the input and output voltage levels which define exactly what is a logic “1” level
and what is a logic “0” level and these are shown below.
There are a large variety of logic gate types in both the bipolar 7400 and the CMOS
4000 families of digital logic gates such as 74Lxx, 74LSxx, 74ALSxx, 74HCxx,
74HCTxx, 74ACTxx etc, with each one having its own distinct advantages and
disadvantages compared to the other. The exact switching voltage required to produce
either a logic “0” or a logic “1” depends upon the specific logic group or family.
However, when using a standard +5 volt supply any TTL voltage input between 2.0v
and 5v is considered to be a logic “1” or “HIGH” while any voltage input below 0.8v
is recognised as a logic “0” or “LOW”. The voltage region in between these two
voltage levels either as an input or as an output is called the Indeterminate Region and
operating within this region may cause the logic gate to produce a false output.
The CMOS 4000 logic family uses different levels of voltages compared to the TTL
types as they are designed using field effect transistors, or FET’s. In CMOS
technology a logic “1” level operates between 3.0 and 18 volts and a logic “0” level is
below 1.5 volts. Then the following table shows the difference between the logic
levels of traditional TTL and CMOS logic gates.
Then from the above observations, we can define the ideal TTL digital logic gate as
one that has a “LOW” level logic “0” of 0 volts (ground) and a “HIGH” level logic
“1” of +5 volts and this can be demonstrated as:
Where the opening or closing of the switch produces either a logic level “1” or a logic
level “0” with the resistor R being known as a “pull-up” resistor.
In the example above, the noise signal is superimposed onto the Vcc supply voltage
and as long as it stays above the minimum level (VON(min)) the input an corresponding
output of the logic gate are unaffected. But when the noise level becomes large
enough and a noise spike causes the HIGH voltage level to drop below this minimum
level, the logic gate may interpret this spike as a LOW level input and switch the
output accordingly producing a false output switching. Then in order for the logic gate
not to be affected by noise it must be able to tolerate a certain amount of unwanted
noise on its input without changing the state of its output.
The simple 2-input Diode-Resistor AND gate can be converted into a NAND gate by
the addition of a single transistor inverting (NOT) stage. Using discrete components
such as diodes, resistors and transistors to make digital logic gate circuits are not used
in practical commercially available logic IC’s as these circuits suffer from
propagation delay or gate delay and also power loss due to the pull-up resistors.
Another disadvantage of diode-resistor logic is that there is no “Fan-out” facility
which is the ability of a single output to drive many inputs of the next stages. Also this
type of design does not turn fully “OFF” as a Logic “0” produces an output voltage of
0.6v (diode voltage drop), so the following TTL and CMOS circuit designs are used
instead.
Next
Logic AND Gate Tutorial