Chapter 4

Working with Flip-Flops

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Understanding latches and gated latches

check Looking at flip-flops

check Building some basic latch and flip-flop circuits

This chapter is about flip-flops, but not the kind you wear on your feet. I wish it were about the kind you wear on your feet, especially if I happened to be wearing a pair while I wrote this because that might mean I’d be writing this at the beach, parked in a beach chair watching children play with the waves.

Don’t you love watching children play with waves? They laugh uncontrollably as they chase after a retreating wave. But when the next wave comes in, the children turn and run, screaming with delight for fear that the wave might catch them, and they might — of all things — get wet.

Alas, this chapter isn’t about the kind of flip-flops you wear to the beach. Instead, it’s about the electronic kind of flip-flop. A flip-flop is a circuit that stores data. As such, flip-flops are the basis of modern computers.

Don’t you think it’s odd that one of the fundamental building blocks of modern thinking machines has a name that suggests it can’t make up its mind?

In this chapter, you learn how to work with simple flip-flop circuits. ...

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