By : Professor Barry Paton
Dalhousie University
IntroductionDigital electronics is one of the fundamental courses found in all electrical
engineering and most science programs. The great variety of LabVIEW
Boolean and numeric controls/indicators, together with the wealth of
programming structures and functions, make LabVIEW an excellent tool to
visualize and demonstrate many of the fundamental concepts of digital
electronics. The inherent modularity of LabVIEW is exploited in the same
way that complex digital integrated circuits are built from circuits of less
complexity, which in turn are built from fundamental gates. This manual
is designed as a teaching resource to be used in the classroom as
demonstrations, in tutorial sessions as collaborative studies, or in the
laboratory as interactive exercises.
The order of the labs follows most electronic textbooks. The first six labs
cover the fundamental circuits of gates, encoders, binary addition,
D-latches, ring counters, and JK flip-flops. Many of the VIs are suitable for
both classroom demonstration and laboratory exploration.
The second set of six labs cover advanced topics such as DACs, ADCs,
seven-segment displays, serial communication, and the CPU. These are best
done in the context of a digital electronics lab, comparing the LabVIEW
simulations with real integrated circuits. In each case, you can enhance
simulations presented in the text by using a National Instruments DAQ
board to interact with the real world through LabVIEW digital I/O, analog
out, analog in, and serial VIs.
Labs 2, 5, and 12 are application oriented and are designed to demonstrate
encoding schemes, digital encryption, and the operation of a CPU. These
labs could be presented as challenging problems in a tutorial setting or in a
workshop environment.
The labs can also be grouped to demonstrate special relationships of
advanced devices on certain basic gates. For example, the CPU operation is
dependent on the concept of registers and two input operations.
This manual includes a complete set of LabVIEW VIs. The text is also
included on the CD so that you can customize the material.
