Flip-Flops and Counters
Up until now, our digital circuits have been strictly combination -- they take inputs and react to them. While they are capable of complex calculations, they lack the ability to remember what they've done. This lack of memory severaly restricts the capabilities of the circuits we can design. The flip-flop is the basic unit of digital memory. A flip-flop can remember one bit of data. Sets of flip-flops are called registers, and can hold bytes of data. Sets of registers are called memories, and can hold many thousands of bits, or more. The basic flip-flop circuit is the classic set of cross-coupled NAND gates. Since nobody builds flip-flops from the gate level anymore, we'll skip past this level of analysis, and move straight into the chips we'll actually use. But if you're interested, The Art of Electronics devotes many pages to the inner workings of flip-flops, from the cross coupled NAND's on up. D-flops One of the most common kinds of flip-flops (or, ...