Book Review: Deluxe Digital-Electronics Primer

Dave Rowell

Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronic Fundamentals, Components, and Processes) by Clive Maxfield; High Text Publishers, 471 pages, ISBN 1-878707-22-1, $35

Having picked up digital electronics on my own, I've always looked for a book that could fill in the holes in my piecemeal self-education. This is it. With clear explanations, many effective figures, and typical British humor, Clive Maxfield surveys not only the basics of computer electronics, but also state-of-the-art semicondu ctor fabrication and packaging techniques. I am happily amazed that Maxfield covers so much, so well. Four hundred plus pages on electronics have never gone so fast.

The humor that peppers the introduction, footnotes, and appendixes (especially the last one, a seafood gumbo recipe) makes for easy reading, but the content is serious, well researched, and up-to-date. It starts with just enough basics from chemistry, physics, and number systems to get you to the workings of semiconductors and simple logic circuits. From there, the book covers tools such as Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, and state diagrams that circuit designers use to build more complex logic from basic gates.

The book then switches gears to discuss semiconductor fabrication processes, the design of memory and programmable logic devices (PLDs), a bestiary of ASICs, packaging strategies (including multichip modules), and promising fabrication technologies such as 3-D interconnect. That the author obviously hand-edited the glossary and comprehensive index is a sign of the quality throughout. Books of this caliber are rare.