Models and logic of MOS circuits

Various models of hardware have been proposed though virtually all of them do not model circuits adequately enough to support and provide a formal basis for many of the informal arguments used by designers of MOS circuits. Such arguments use rather crude discrete notions of strength—designers cannot be too finicky about precise resistances and capacitances when building a chip—as well as subtle derived notions of information flow between points in the circuit. One model, that of R. E. Bryant, tackles such issues in reasonable generality and has been used as the basis of several hardware simulators. However Bryant’s model is not compositional. These lectures introduce Bryant’s ideas and present a compositional model for the behaviour of MOS circuits when the input is steady, show how this leads to a logic, and indicate the difficulties in providing a full and accurate treatment for circuits with changing inputs.