Posted: Sat 2006 Jun 17 5:18
Luke wrote:... I did that last year in electronics lab! ...
What bothered me at the time was that they showed us a half-adder circuit that we then built on a circuit design board (breadboard, now where did that name come from?) and tested to verify that it worked.
They then showed us a completely different circuit for a full-adder and we did the same thing. It took me about an hour of explanation and demonstration to show them that it would be possible to take two half-adder circuits, add them together, and make a full-adder! To me it was a logical extention of what we were doing. To them, they had never really thought about it.
Obviously, the full-adder circuit had been optimized to take the least components. I know how to do that but, at the time, it made more sense to see the intermediate step of two half-adders making a full-adder.
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Thank you for attending todays lecture. Tomorrows lecture will be on how to convert any flip-flop into any other type of flip-flop using nothing but logic diagrams. The result will show which logic gates and components will be required to make the actual physical modification.