Digital Logic Circuit State
Digital logic circuits can be divided into two types: combinational logic, whose output signals are dependent only on its present input signals, and sequential logic, whose outputs are a function of both the current inputs and the past history of inputs. In sequential logic, information from past inputs is stored in electronic memory elements, such as flip-flops and latches. The stored contents of these memory elements, at a given point in time, is collectively referred to as the circuit's "state". It represents all the distilled information about the past that the circuit has access to.
For example, the state of a microprocessor (computer chip) is the contents of all the memory elements; accumulators, storage registers, data caches, and flags, in the processor. When computers such as laptops go into a "hibernation" mode to save energy by shutting down the processor, the state of the processor is stored on the computer's disk, so it can be restored when the computer comes out of hibernation, and the processor can take up operations where it left off.
Read more about this topic: State (computer Science)
Famous quotes containing the words logic, circuit and/or state:
“The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)