Digital 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 ofadvanced devices on certain basic gates. For example, the CPU operation is dependent on the concept of registers and two input operations.