CSCI 255 — Chapter 3 comments

The PowerPoint

• Sequential circuits

Notes on the PowerPoint

• Slide 20: Timing diagrams — latch vs. flip-flop
• Slide 22-26: Common flip-flop controls
• Slide 31: Moore vs Mealy FSMs
  • Does Moore sometimes imply more?
  • Moore vs Mealy outputs
• Slide 46: binary vs one-hot encoding
  • Could 2ⁿ flip-flops be better than n flip-flops
  • Most developers will us use compact rather than one-hot codings (See the Xilinx recommendations)
  • There are programs to find an efficient encoding for a FSM specified in KISS2 format.
• Slide 58: Factoring state machines
  • You don’t write that Java assignment in one class!
  • Also m×n states are more than m+n states.
• Slides 63 to 73: Timing
  • Postponed until CSCI 320
• Slides 86 to 94: Metastability and synchronizers
  • Buridan’s Principle by Leslie Lamport, the creator of LaTeX
  • 6.004 lecture on synchronization and arbitration