Digital Electronics Tutorial

Introduction to Digital Electronics

If you would like to learn all about digital electronics from 0 (basic) to 1 (expert level), then you are in the right place. In this tutorial of digital electronics, we will facilitate you to develop a basic understanding of digital electronics that is helpful to resolve every theoretical or numerical problem regardless of their difficulty level. Meanwhile, you will also learn to use these concepts in your live projects.

Overview of Digital System

Overview of Digital System

Before the existence of digital systems, it had been very complex to make large calculations, data processing, data transfer, and power transmission to various small components in a circuit and many other scientific applications. Real-time updates and data processing are unachievable things, and these functions are the core of most of the operations in industry and space live projects. To beat all these challenges, we use digital systems.

The foremost advantage of a digital system is that we can easily change the program (set of instructions) as per the required specific output.

In general, electronic systems are classified into two types, i.e., analog and digital.

Analog System:- Analog systems are those systems within which voltages and currents vary continuously and gradually throughout the given range. Within a specified range, they'll take infinite values.

Digital System:- Those systems during which voltage levels assume a finite number of discrete values, are known as Digital System. Practically each voltage level is a narrow band of voltages. Digital circuits are also known as switching or logic circuits because every digital circuit obeys a particular set of logical rules to switch from one value to another.

Their transition time is assumed to be zero. It can take many inputs and give the desired output based on the different internal and external conditions. Generally, the digital system takes values in the form of '1' and '0'. Sometimes they are also called "True" and "False."

Basic requirements for designing the digital electronic system are:-

  • Input devices: - Such as sensors, microphones, cameras, etc.
  • Output devices: - Such as actuators, loudspeakers, motors, etc.
  • Input Converters: - To convert input data into the discrete electrical signals.
  • Output converters: - To convert discrete electrical signals into the required form.
  • Digital Electronic Circuit:- Digital Electronics Circuit generates data output in accordance with input data.

Block Diagram of Digital System

Block diagram of the digital system

Advantages of Digital System

1. Easy to design

2. Easy to store bulk information with greater accuracy and precision

  • Digital systems can easily be extended to any number of significant digits by using extra switching circuits.
  • Semiconductor devices employed in digital systems have a large capacity to store data.

3. These systems have Stable memories

4. These systems are Less affected by surrounding atmosphere such as noise etc.

5. We can Easily Reprogram digital systems.

6. Digital systems are of compact size

7. These systems consumes Less power dissipation or losses

8. Protection of data

9. Less power consumption

Limitations of Digital System

1. The human brain doesn't understand digital data easily.

2. Data must be in digital or binary form, so the need for data conversion arises.

3. Need for analog to digital converter and vice-versa.

Applications of Digital System

All modern major electronic devices are composed of the digital circuits. Some of the applications of digital system are listed below.

1. Digital voltmeters

2. Digital displays

3. Electronic Calculators

4. Data processing

5. Microwaves

6. Digital watches

7. Countdown timer

8. Traffic lights

9. Mobile phones

10. Automatic glass doors in shopping malls

11. Fuel tank indicator in modern automobiles.

How to identify that an electronic device consists of a digital circuit or not?

To identify the presence of any digital circuit in an electronic device, look for the answers to the following statements.

  1. Presence of any kind of display that shows pictures, videos or any other symbols.
  2. Presence of any memory or data storage component which is used to store data.
  3. Can we re-program the device easily?
  4. Any facility to connect the device with the internet.

Among the given four statements, if any one or more than one observations are found, then there are huge chances that the particular device is consists of a digital circuit.

Prerequisites:

Before starting, there aren't any pre-requisites. We will start from scratch and moving forward, and we will increase our understanding of the digital electronics stepwise step.

Digital Electronics Index