I haven't seen the first edition of this book, but judging from reviews (all of which are dated before the 2nd Edition came out, which was December 2002), the 2nd Edition has added a lot of new material that addresses some of the criticisms of the first edition. I used a pre-publication draft of this book in a class with Professor Chandrakasan last fall, and it covered topics such as transistor sizing, crosstalk and transmission line effects, threshold voltage level effects, logic synthesis (though this book does not go into HDL design), and many other more advanced topics.

It's also been made more up-to-date, removing a lot of the dated material some reviews on this page have been complaining about.

Since I am just learning this material, I cannot comment on how relevant or complete this new edition really is, but I would urge anyone who was disappointed with the first edition to check out the 2nd edition. Actually, I'd urge everyone who used the first edition to check it out. From what I've seen, it's like a completely different book.

very nice textbook for undergrad students

Rating: 5/5

You are wrong if you think this book is out-of-date.
It contains all the information needed to get for a
undergrad. Of course, it doesn't cover all the concepts
, technology in digital circuit design. But you get
enough material to study for class (one or two semesters).
Most schools still use this book as textbook now.
Nice textbook to buy!

DIC is an average textbook

Rating: 2/5

Like most circuit design books, DIC doesn't cover issues that a serious circuit designer should know about. It does not mention or barely covers transistor sizing techniques, drive strengths for standard cell libraries, antenna rule checks, synthesis, and signal integrity issues like crosstalk. Sequencing elements like flipflops and latchs and memory design are covered poorly. Despite this, pipelining and parallelism are covered fairly effectively compared to other texts. Many other circuit design books are also fairly outdated now with respect to semiconductor technology. For instance at 10um cmos technology, leakage power is significant, but a casual reader would never know that you should increase the transistor threshold voltage or lengths on circuits on non-critical timing paths to control this nanometer effect.