CHAPTER 14

Programmable Logic

Designs that use the combinational and sequential logic described in Chap. 12 can be built using lots of separate ICs. Maybe you have a design that requires a 10-stage counter divider and binary-to-decimal decoder plus a NAND gate or two. While you can still buy the chips to make such a circuit, this would never be done for a commercial product. The chip count for the logic part of all but the most complex designs is rapidly heading toward one. This one chip might be a microcontroller as described in Chap. 13, but this essentially moves the design problem from hardware design to software programming. Programming is a discipline with different roots to electronics and is fraught with problems of maintaining code ...

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