Book Review: New Digital Troubleshooting Techniques: A Complete Illustrated Guide

New Digital Troubleshooting Techniques: a Complete l/lustrated Guide: ROBERTG. MIDDLETON (Prentice-Hall, 1984, 280 pp., £22.45 hardback) There is a principle amongst engineers and scientists that, if they cannot 'measure' something, then they know very little about it. Perhaps the principle might also be extended to 'troubleshooting'. If this premise is to be accepted, then this new book will go a long way to helping all electronic engineers and technicians to a better understanding of the operation and behaviour of digital electronic circuits. In the modern jargon, it is a 'user-friendly' book, written in an extremely downto-earth and lucid fashion. Indeed, the author makes the subject 'come to life'. Although he states that the book is aimed at electronic technicians, it will probably be useful and interesting to more academic electronic engineers, because it deals with the operation and behaviour of so many different digital circuits and their possible malfunctions. It will be helpful to lecturers for the 'tips' which can enliven their lectures; and it will also help them in designing digital electronics laboratory experiments and in the teaching of the associated laboratory techniques. It will also be a boon to engineers, researchers, and degree and diploma students, especially for their project work. The author claims that this book is the most complete guide to digital-circuit troubleshooting and repair available, and this may be true. Many never-before-published troubleshooting techniques are presented, along with 'case histories' (some from manufacturers) to show how these techniques and procedures can be applied in practice. The book contains details of the construction of some invaluable pieces of test-equipment, such as a variety of 'logic probes', a 'counter read-out probe', and a 'digital-word recogniser'. It also includes details of digital circuit construction projects and the related follow-up tests and measurements on them. The book contains 15 chapters which deal, firstly, with digital troubleshooting basics, and then, in order, the troubleshooting of: latches; asynchronous counters; synchronous counters; encoders and decoders; master-slave flip-flops; multiplexers and demultiplexers; comparators and parity generators/checkers; shift registers; binary adders; currents and voltages in digital circuits, and three-state buses and microprocessors. These are followed by troubleshooting procedures; trouble symptom analysis (explained in the text), and, finally, signature analysis techniques. This book is a 'mine of information'. It is pleasingly typeset and very readable. It contains numerous clear diagrams and photographs and there is a good index. The author claims that this book is an electronic technician's best workbench 'tool'. He may well be right. It is a book to be 'used' and only time would tell! BRIAN M. SHAW, Division of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hat.field Polytechnic