Digital Logic

Digital Logic was another instance of something I had almost never seen before. It was an introduction to digital circuit design and my first ever exposure to hardware as a subject.

This one started out simple and taught things like gate level design and truth tables; later, it delved into synchronous circuit elements and Verilog programming; which is where the tension came in. As I mentioned before, I had never seen anything related to hardware before this course. So when they started introducing details on synchronous circuits and flip flops I began to worry as I was unable to cope with the pace. I then decided to do some reading from the text book and solve some questions from there as well, to supplement the material from the lectures. I also put in extra effort to solve the tutorials again, to try and pick up something I may have missed. All these efforts eventually led to an improvement in my understanding of the concepts taught.

This was one of the more challenging courses of the first semester, and the fact that I had no previous experience with it, worried me more. However as the course progressed, I was able to grasp the concepts and developed an interest in them which further helped me crystallize my understanding.

Another skill I was able to pick up through this course was Verilog programming because it closely resembles C programming. Verilog programming later proved to be quite useful in year 2 as there was a follow-up course for Digital Logic called Digital System Design which mainly dealt with more complex Verilog coding.

I add a special mention to the professors who taught this course as their teaching was the reason I was able to gain more knowledge on hardware.

The main lesson I learnt from this course was to keep looking for answers even when you don't know what questions to ask. Being unable to understand anything during a portion of the course, I found myself feeling quite lost and flustered, especially during the lab quizzes. But I kept trying to read and gather information from lecture notes and tutorials and eventually managed to figure some of the things out.