The e-course is the second part of the series “The way the creators of smart nanochips work”. This series introduces students to the basic ideas on which modern digital electronics is built and talks about the work of teams of engineers in high-tech industries that are engaged in the design of nanometer microcircuits.
Every smartphone, car, and spaceship have microchips that control their behavior.
These microcircuits execute programs, exchange information with each other, take readings from sensors and display information for a human- user.
Recently, more and more chips with specialized units for recognizing images and other data using hardware accelerators for neural networks have been released.
Each microcircuit is a result of the labor of thousands of people who own dozens of specialized professions.
A series of e-courses "The way the creators of smart nanochips work" consists of three e-courses, in which the technological stage by stage process of creating a microcircuit is described, as well as how the construction of the product is assembled.
The e-course “The logical side of digital circuitry” tells about the work of engineers who design the logic circuits of digital hardware units. These engineers use Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages, a register-based development methodology, and logic synthesis programs.
The course also describes the basic elements from which designers build a circuit: logic elements, D-flip-flops, arithmetic blocks and state machines and shows the logic of the circuit.
The course also demonstrates how several lines of code in the hardware description language turn into a graph of logical elements, which can then be used by another engineer who specializes not in logic, but in physics.
The following e-course “The physical side of digital circuitry” describes the work of physical design specialists who determine how the logical components are placed on the site of the chip.
For students taking this e-course it is desirable (but not necessary) to be familiar with “boolean algebra”, “binary numbers” and “ transistor operations” (in the series the brief explanations are given on these topics) and to understand the concepts of the “algorithm” and be able to program in any language.
