School of Computing & Mathematics

First Year – Semester One

CSC-10029: Fundamentals of Computing

Practical Sheet 01
Logic Gates & SimCir
This practical uses SimCir – a simulator of logic gates and simple digital circuits. The tasks on this
practical sheet are designed to give you a greater understanding of SimCir, logic-gates and truth
tables.

Task One: SimCir interface

You should be able to find a shortcut to SimCir on the desktop of any of the PCs in the School’s
laboratories. Once you have started SimCir you should see a GUI that looks similar to the one
shown below.

Scrollable
selection of logic
gates etc.

Circuit drawing-
pane: drag-and-
drop the gates
and connect
them up to create
your own
circuits.

As you can see, on the left hand side of the GUI is a scrollable list containing icons for some
common logic-gates such as AND, OR, NOT and several others. All of these logic-gates are drag-
and-droppable into the large white circuit-drawing pane of the SimCir GUI.

In addition to the logic gates in the scrollable list, three items in particular from this list will be very
useful to you: D.C.5V (just think of this as a steady supply of high voltage i.e. binary ‘1’s),
ToggleSwitch (acts like a light switch – pressing the square-button in the middle of this switch
allows you to open/close the switch) and LED (allows you to see whether an output terminal of any
circuit-component is outputting a ‘1’ (lights-up red) or a ‘0’ (the light shows black).

Construct your own version of the simple circuit shown above which just uses a D.C.5V supply, two
ToggleSwitches and two LEDs: then try clicking the square-button in the centre of each
ToggleSwitch to see what happens.

TN/CD CSC-10029: Practical Sheet 01 Page 1 of 2

Task Two – Simulating logic gates in SimCir

Task 2.1: In Lecture 5, we discussed the operation of three basic logic gates, namely, AND, OR
and NOT. Use SimCir to visualise the operation of each of these three logic gates when presented
with suitable Boolean inputs (i.e., inputs that can be switched “on” or “off”) and construct a
corresponding truth table summarising the operation of each gate.

You can save your completed circuit design in a file using SimCir’s ‘File’
menu option. (In this way you can also save a partially completed circuit
design and then return to it later by reloading your design from that file.)

As you complete each of the tasks in this practical, please save your circuit
design in a suitably named file. Truth tables should be constructed in a Word
document. Once you have completed all tasks on the practical sheet create a
single zip file containing all of your finished circuit designs as well as the
Word file and upload the zipped file on the KLE drop box that has been set-up
for this practical work.

The tasks on this practical sheet are not part of the module’s assessment and
your circuit designs will not be marked. However, the uploaded zip file will
be a useful record of your work for this week’s practical tasks.

Task 2.2: Verify the operation of the NAND gate icon from SimCir and compare this to a
NAND gate constructed from combining a basic AND gate and a NOT gate. Summarise the
behaviour of both circuits in a truth table.

Task 2.3: Verify the operation of the NOR gate icon from SimCir and compare this to a
NOR gate constructed from combining a basic OR gate and a NOT gate. Summarise the behaviour
of both circuits in a truth table.

Task Three: Deriving basic gates from NAND (one of the universal gates)

For each of the diagrams below, construct the corresponding logic circuit in SimCir and verify its
operation. Summarise all input and output combinations in a truth table.

A NOT A
 
 
 
A
AB
B
 

AB
B

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