Analyzing the Setup
Imagine you are an electrical engineer tasked with simplifying a digital circuit. You are given a circuit with two inputs, A and B.
Each of these inputs is first passed through its own NOT gate. The outputs from these NOT gates are then combined and fed into a single NAND gate to produce the final output, Y.
Our goal is to find a single, basic logic gate that performs the exact same operation as this entire combination.
Tracing the Intermediate Signals
Let's break this down step by step. First, we need to determine the signals immediately after the NOT gates.
When input
A passes through the first NOT gate, it gets inverted. Let's call this intermediate output
Y1. Therefore, we can write:
Y1=A
Similarly, when input
B passes through the second NOT gate, it also gets inverted. Let's call this second intermediate output
Y2. This gives us:
Y2=B
The Master Equation
Now, these two intermediate signals, Y1 and Y2, act as the inputs for the final NAND gate.
Remember the function of a NAND gate: it first performs an AND operation on its inputs, and then applies a NOT operation to the result.
So, the final output
Y can be expressed as the complement of the product of
Y1 and
Y2:
Y=Y1⋅Y2
Final Calculation and Simplification
Now, let's substitute the expressions we found for Y1 and Y2 back into our master equation.
Replacing
Y1 with
A and
Y2 with
B, we get:
Y=A⋅B
This expression looks a bit intimidating with those double bars, but we have a powerful mathematical tool to simplify it: De Morgan's Law.
De Morgan's Law states that the complement of a product is equal to the sum of the complements. Mathematically, X⋅Y=X+Y.
Applying this law to our expression, we break the long top bar and change the AND (
⋅) operation to an OR (
+) operation:
Y=A+B
Finally, we apply the principle of double negation. The double complement of any variable is simply the variable itself (A=A).
Applying this, our expression simplifies beautifully to:
Y=A+B
This final equation is the standard Boolean expression for an OR gate. Therefore, the entire complex circuit is functionally equivalent to a simple OR gate!