Boolean Algebra and Digital Logic Circuits for Computer Hardware

Computer hardware is made of electrical circuits. High and low voltages of electrical circuits are considered as true and false or 1 and 0, respectively, of binary data in Boolean logic, which is also known as “symbolic logic,” and deals with true and false values in logical reasoning. The implementation of a digital circuit can be expressed as a Boolean expression. Hence, Boolean logic is used to design digital circuits (called “digital logic circuits”). This chapter first introduces Boolean logic and then gives the design of digital logic circuits for such computer components as the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) of the central processing unit (CPU) and memory to illustrate how computer hardware works to process and store binary data.