Some Common Applications of Logic Gates

June 15, 2018 by Electrical4U

During the course of discussion about various digital logic gates, we have
mainly discussed about the design, property and operation of them. In this
article we will look at various applications of logic gates. Their applications
are determined mainly based upon their truth table i.e. their mode of operations.
In the following discussion we will look at the applications of basic logic gates
as well as many other normal logic gates as well.
Application of OR gate
Wherever the occurrence of any one or more than one event is needed to be
detected or some actions are to be taken after their occurrence, in all those cases
OR gates can be used. It can be explained with an example.

Suppose in an industrial plant if one or more than one parameter exceeds the
safe value, some protective measure is needed to be done. In that case OR gate
is used. We are going to show this with the help of a diagram.

The above figure is a typical schematic diagram where an OR gate is used to

detect exceed of temperature or pressure and produce command signal for the
system to take required actions.
Application of AND Gate
There are mainly two applications of AND gate as Enable gate and Inhibit
gate. Enable gate means allowance of data through a channel and Inhibit gate is
just the reverse of that process i.e. disallowance of data through a channel. We
are going to show an enabling operation to understand it in an easier way.
Suppose in the measurement of frequency of a pulsed waveform. For
measurement of frequency a gating pulse of known frequency is sent to enable
the passage of the waveform whose frequency is to be measured. The diagram
below shows the arrangement of the above explained operation.

Application of Ex-OR/Ex-NOR Gate

These type of logic gates are used in generation of parity generation and
checking units. The two diagrams below shows the even and odd parity
generator circuits respectively for a four data.

With the help of these gates parity check operation can be also performed. The
diagrams below show even and odd parity check.

Figure (a) shows the parity check using Ex-OR gates and the figure (b) shows
the parity check using Ex-NOR gates.
Application of NOT gate or Inverters
NOT gates are also known as inverter because they invert the output given to
them and show the reverse result. Now the CMOS inverters are commonly used
to build square wave oscillators which are used for generating clock signals.
The advantage of using these is they consume low power and their interfacing is
very easy compared to other logic gates.

The above figure shows the most fundamental circuit made of ring
configuration to generate square wave oscillator. The frequency of this type
generator is given by

Where, n represents the number of inverters and tp shows the propagation delay
per gate.