Digital Diagnostics: How Much should the Patient Tell?

The first logic circuits I ever worked on used relays. In distinction to TTL, these circuits were PBL (pin ball logic). One characteristic all logic circuits seem to share whether constructed of relays, transistors, ICs, or the latest VLSI devices is that, past a certain complexity, the function of a circuit is not readily apparent to a person who was not a party to its design. This is not to say that the function can't be determined. But there will be a price to pay in man-hours for an individual to get inside of the designer's head and obtain an intimate knowlege of the circuit. This may be desirable when working on the same circuitry day in and day out, but when many pieces of equipment are worked on infrequently, such an approach is not cost effective.

Published

1983-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00615

ISBN

978-1-61482-913-3