CSC 311 Lab Report Guidelines

1. The lab report does not have to be typed, but it should be relatively neat and readable.
2. Each lab team member should turn in a separate lab report (even if it is just a copy of the team's report).
3. Each report should contain the purpose of a circuit, a circuit diagram, and a table of the circuit's output.
4. An English description of a circuit should include a brief summary of the circuit's purpose. This purpose may be something as simple as "4-bit adder" or "testing output of OR of two inputs".
5. Any special considerations in constructing the circuit should be noted somewhere in the English description or as annotations to the circuit diagram. For example, outputs typically go to LEDs. Thus a circuit diagram should indicate that somehow.
6. If testing the circuit (viz. the process of producing a truth table) involves any special considerations, these should be noted in the lab report.
7. A circuit diagram should indicate gates by their chip number (e.g. a NOT gate should have the number 7404 written inside the gate) and each wire to/from the gate should be labeled according to the pin number used in actually constructing the circuit (e.g. input lines 4 and 5 and output line 6 for a NAND gate).
8. A circuit diagram should indicate all pins that are used. If the actual chip is pictured (not just gates), then include the power and ground pins in your picture. If the picture is just gates, leave out power and ground.
9. If a truth table is required, it should reflect the actual behavior of the circuit, not the desired or intended behavior.  If the truth table does not match the circuit, you will lose extra points (beyond that for having the wrong answer) for an inconsistent lab report.
10. If you do not get the intended results, your lab report should indicate this and, where possible, provide some diagnosis of the more specific problem (as opposed to saying "the circuit doesn't work").
11. A truth table should always have inputs on the left side. Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, the rows should always be in numerical order (e.g. 000, 001, 010, etc.).
12. The truth table should have outputs one column per LED. The columns should go left to right in decreasing magnitude. Thus the leftmost column should have the most significant digit. For example, the decimal number 3 is 011 in binary. If this was an output in a truth table, the columns should read 0, 1, and 1 going from left to right.