Introduction To Digital Computer Design

This highly acclaimed, well established, book now in its fifth edition, is intended for an introductory course in digital computer design for B.Sc. students of computer science, B.Tech. students of computer science and engineering, and BCA/MCA students of computer applications. A knowledge of programming in C or Java would be useful to give the student a proper perspective to appreciate the development of the subject. The first part of the book presents the basic tools and developes procedures suitable for the design of digital circuits and small digital systems. It equips students with a firm understanding of logic principles before they study the intricacies of logic organization and architecture of computers in the second part. Besides discussing data representation, arithmetic operations, Boolean algebra and its application in designing combinatorial and sequential switching circuits, the book introduces the Algorithmic State Machines which are used to develop a hardware description language for the design of digital systems. The organization of a small hypothetical computer is described to illustrate how instruction sets are evolved. Real computers (namely, Pentium and MIPs machines) are described and compared with the hypothetical computer. After discussing the features of a CPU, I/O devices and I/O organization, cache and virtual memory, the book concludes with a new chapter on the use of parallelism to enhance the speed of computers. Besides, the fifth edition has new material in CMOS gates, MSI/ALU and Pentium5 architecture. The chapter on Cache and Virtual Memory has been rewritten.

I have been using the first edition of this book as a text for a number of years. This was in a Stanford University first-year graduate course that is taken by students from Electrical Engineering or Computer Science who are interested in computer organization. Because computer tech nology has been changing so rapidly, it became necessary to supplement the text with additional readings. My colleagues and I examined many newly-published books for possible use as texts. We found no book with the same excellent choice of topics and thorough coverage as Dr. Gschwind's first edition. Springer-Verlag's request that I prepare a second edition of this book came at a time when I had many other projects underway. Before I de cided whether to take on the project of preparing a revision, I asked many of my students for their opinions of Dr. Gschwind's first edition. Even I was surprised by the enthusiasm that this rather skeptical and critical group of students displayed for the book. It was this enthusiasm that convinced me of the value and importance of preparing the revision.