The Physics of Computing

Marilyn Wolf is Elmer E. Koch Professor of Engineering and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She received her BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She was with AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1984 to 1989, was on the faculty of Princeton University from 1989 to 2007 and was Farmer Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems and GRA Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2019. Her research interests include cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things, embedded computing, embedded computer vision, and VLSI systems. She has received the IEEE Computer Society Goode Memorial Award, the ASEE Terman Award, and IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Education Award. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM and a Golden Core member of IEEE Computer Society. Professor Wolf is the author of several successful Morgan Kaufmann textbooks: Computers as Components, Fifth Edition (2022); High-Performance Embedded Computing, Second Edition (2014); The Physics of Computing, First Edition (2016); and Embedded System Interfacing, First Edition (2019).

Chapter 1. Electronic Computers

Chapter 2. Transistors and Integrated Circuits

Chapter 3. Logic Gates

Chapter 4. Sequential Machines

Chapter 5. Processors and Systems

Chapter 6. Input and Output

Chapter 7. Emerging Technologies