Digital Electronics Tutorial

Introduction to Digital Electronics
Digital concepts applied to electronics give rise to the field of Digital electronics. Digital circuits form the backbone of modern-day gadgets like cell phone, digital cameras, GPS displays, etc. since all these devices use information which is digital in nature. Digital systems find application in modern-day traffic systems, control systems, weather forecasting systems, and the internet, etc.

One of the reasons for the widespread application of digital systems is the use of Digital computers in applications that provides users with flexibility as any change can be incorporated with the change in system software thus reducing cost which also is an additional advantage. Discrete Information used by digital systems is represented in the form of signals which can be classified as Discrete or Continuous signals and systems can be classified as analog and digital systems.

Discrete information is a finite set like the outcome of throwing dice with the output possibilities as 1, 2,3,4,5 or 6.  The discrete signals used in electronics systems have two discrete values either 0 or 1. In other words, it can be said that the outcome can be mapped to two outcomes either 0 or 1.

Each binary digit 0 and 1 is called a bit and a group of bits that represent the information in digital form is called binary codes. Most of the information is in analog form and to represent it in digital form it has to be converted and the device used for this known as Analog to Digital converter (ADC) and at the receiver side the same information has to be converted to analog form using Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). A basic data transmission system can be represented as shown below