tions for the future. The book is attractive both in the contents and in presentation. The editor, invited authors, printers and publishers have collectively produced this valuable source of information and no serious project manager can afford not to consult it. It would be a sensible idea to first budget for the modest £16 for this useful volume before parting with £16 000 for a development system. Additionally, the book on the whole offers a recipe for successful product development. So I am recommending it as essential reading for students taking our microprocessor applica- tions and product innovation courses.

D M Vaidya WestfieM College, UK

From binary to system design S J Cahill Digital and microprocessor engineering Ellis Horwood (1982) pp 508

This book is what it sets out to be, a college textbook aimed at undergrad- uate electronic engineering students. It covers from an introduction to binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers systems to microcomputer system design.

In covering so much ground, some subjects are of necessity dealt with somewhat briefly, e.g. error detection including an elementary treatment of the work of R W Hamming is dealt with in two pages. However this is compensated for by the inclusion of comprehensive reference lists at the end of each chapter. It was reassuring to see such standard works as Lewin's Theory and design of digital computers and Peatman's Microcomputer based design included in the references.

The main strength of this book lies in the treatment of combinational logic and sequential circuits both at the algebraic and implementation levels.

As is perhaps to be expected in the age of integrated circuit technology, digital electronics at the logic circuit characteristics and gate implementa- tion level are treated in a qualitative manner. Indeed the aim is to make the reader conversant with the concepts of static logic parameters such as voltage and current levels, fan-in, fan-out and

noise immunity and dynamic logic parameters such as propagation delay, power dissipation, etc. The gate design of combinational logic is treated at length and in detail with the liberal use of K (Karnaugh) maps and truth tables.

The treatment covers design using discrete gates or SSI devices and the analysis of MSI and LSI devices. The combinational design algorithms cover do not care states, multiple outputs and the static hazards which arise from differential time delays.

A complete section deals with sequential circuits, i.e. the extension of logic to the two dimensions of logic state and time. This section deals with latches and J K and D flipflops as the building bricks of counters.

The design of synchronous Counters using counter flow diagrams, state assignment tables, state tables, Y-maps and transition tables is dealt with at length and in detail. Integrated coun- ters such as the 7490 and 74160 series are also examined. The remainder of the section extends the use of latches and flipflops to read/write memories and sequential arithmetic circuitry.

The microprocessor section deals mainly with the Motorola 6800 and its family of support devices. However it begins with a good basic description of the principles of stored program pro- cessing.

The book concludes with an intro- duction to microprocessor software. Although mentioning quite correctly that software has a number of phases including design and implementation, the greater part is devoted to coding at Assembly language level with a brief mention of BASIC. This is perhaps inevitable at the end of a book devoted mainly to hardware engineering where microprocessors are seen as replace- ments for complex random logic cir- cuitry.

The book is well supported by numerous worked examples and prob- lems. It is well produced with many clear diagrams. It well meets the pur- pose for which it is intended.

Joe Gallacher Microprocessor Systems

Engineering Ltd

Fluent, easy to read - but not very technical B E Cline 'Microprogramming - concepts and techniques' Petrocelli (I 98 I) £ 17. 00, pp 169 The area of microprogramming is intri- guing, difficult and highly dynamic. It caters, however, only for a compara- tively small community. These factors seem to have impeded the publication of generally usable text books in that area for quite a while, despite the fact that the need for a more up-to-date textbook for a general audience exis- ted. Writing such a book is not an easy task because of the wide variety of dif- ferent fields that have to be incorpora- ted and used as a basis. It is even more difficult to write a book which should also appeal to the naive readers. This invariably means that the author must be doubly sophisticated.

The author of this book, in his own words, tries to write a book for 'all who desire to understand the funda- mental workings of modern digital computers', for both the 'student' and the 'computer professional'. I feel that this book does not live up to the expec- tations. The author employs a very fluent easy-to-read style and sections of the book would make a useful after- dinner speech - but not a technical book.

The first surprise comes from the fact a single reference is cited in the text (p 51) and that the bibliography contains a meager 18 references, some of them only marginally related to the subject. The various topics are touched but never treated in detail or systema- tically. Many topics are missing (e.g. firmware, monitoring and diagnosis via microprograms). The figures are large, almost all of them cover a separate page, but they are not very instructive.

The book comprises a total of 165 pages, divided into 11 chapters: Chap- ter 1 ('Computer architecture over- view', 9 pages text) should tune the user into the problem of computer architecture and its implementation. All major components of a computer are described, the promised 'concepts and terminology' are missing. The author even forgot to speak about computer architecture d let alone

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