Digital Circuit Design for High Schoolers

Craft Electronic Pathways

Your future as a Digital Circuit Design starts here.

Digital Circuit Design studies the behavior and movement of electrons in physical components and applies these fundamental concepts to the design and construction of the electronic products we use every day. The series incorporates three major units of study: Analog electronics fundamentals, Digital logic circuits, and Digital circuit design with High-level Description Languages (HLDs). Analog electronics is concerned with the design of circuits used to control continuously varying electronic signals. Digital logic circuits are used to transform and process analog signals using two discrete voltage or logic levels. Digital circuit design with High-level Description Languages (HLDs) addresses advanced digital design techniques applied to real-world signal processing problems and their applications.

Digital Integrated Circuits (ICs), or “chips” control most modern electronic devices, from cellular phones and peripheral “wearables” to computers including CPU and GPUs, appliances, automobiles, and many more. Additionally, the supply chain shortage experienced during the pandemic and beyond, especially in the area of chip production, spotlighted the need for many countries to develop on-shore manufacturing capabilities, and significant funding has since been allocated by companies and governments world-wide resulting in explosive job opportunities for Digital Design Engineers.

Many students opt to study pure Computer Science (CS) in their college programs. This, in part, may be due to the lack of exposure at the high-school level to the detailed hardware required to run the programs written by computer scientists. Graduates with knowledge in computer (digital) hardware, even if pursuing a pure CS degree, are in high demand as the landscape of processing power evolves with new applications, such as the processing required to train large language models (LLMs) as part of a generative AI application, which in turn requires innovative allocation of hardware resources to provide efficient models and prediction capabilities. The Intro to Digital Circuit Design series provides students with this introductory hardware design exposure.