This book provides a foundation in digital design for students in computer engineering, electrical engineering and computer science courses. It deals with digital design as an activity in a larger systems design context. Instead of focusing on gate-level design and aspects of digital design that have diminishing relevance in a real-world design context, the book concentrates on modern and evolving knowledge and design skills.

Most modern digital design practice involves design of embedded systems, using small microcontrollers, larger CPUs/DSPs, or hard or soft processor cores. Designs involve interfacing the processor or processors to memory, I/O devices and communications interfaces, and developing accelerators for operations that are too computationally intensive for processors. Target technologies include ASICs, FPGAs, PLDs and PCBs. This is a significant change from earlier design styles, which involved use of small-scale integrated (SSI) and medium-scale integrated (MSI) circuits. In such systems, the primary design goal was to minimize gate count or IC package count. Since processors had lower performance and memories had limited capacity, a greater proportion of system functionality was implemented in hardware.

While design practices and the design context have evolved, many textbooks have not kept track. They continue to promote practices that are largely obsolete or that have been subsumed into computer-aided design (CAD) tools. They neglect many of the important considerations for modern designers. This book addresses the shortfall by taking an approach that embodies modern design practice. The book presents the view that digital logic is a basic abstraction over analog electronic circuits. Like any abstraction, the digital abstraction relies on assumptions being met and constraints being satisfied. Thus, the book includes discussion of the electrical and timing properties of circuits, leading to an understanding of how they influence design at higher levels of abstraction. Also, the book teaches a methodology based on using abstraction to manage complexity, along with principles and methods for making design trade-offs. These intellectual tools allow students to track evolving design practice after they graduate.