Mehran Mozaffari Kermani

About Mehran

Mehran Mozaffari Kermani is a professor at the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing at the University of South Florida. His research covers computer arithmetic, cryptographic hardware and fault detection in digital circuits, and he worked as an ASIC design engineer at AMD before he joined academia. He earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Western Ontario, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and is a senior member of IEEE. On binarytranslator.ai he reviews the logic gate, binary arithmetic and floating-point tools.

In Mehran's words

In hardware, an adder is just gates wired together. If you understand XOR and AND, you understand how a chip adds two numbers.

Tools Mehran reviewed

Guides

Binary basics

Floating point numbers explained: why 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3

A floating point number is scientific notation in binary. See why 0.1 + 0.2 is 0.30000000000000004, how precise floats are, float vs double, and how to compare floats and handle money.9 min readProgramming

Python bitwise operators and XOR, with examples

Python's bitwise operators &, |, ^, ~, << and >> explained bit by bit. XOR for flipping bits, ciphers and logical XOR, masks and flags, shifts, and & versus and.10 min readBinary basics

Half adder and full adder

Half adder and full adder circuits with truth tables and Boolean equations, a full adder built from two half adders, a 4-bit ripple carry adder you can try, and subtraction with the same circuit.7 min readBinary basics

De Morgan's law explained

Both of De Morgan's laws with a truth table proof, a live checker, step-by-step examples, practice problems, and how the laws work in logic gates and in code.8 min readBinary basics

Logic gates explained

The 7 basic logic gates with symbols, Boolean expressions and truth tables, a live tester for every gate, and how NAND gates and half adders turn bits into arithmetic.9 min read

Questions for Mehran

How does your research connect to this site?

My research is on computer arithmetic and on detecting faults in digital circuits, including the hardware that runs cryptography. All of it is built from the same logic gates and binary operations the tools here show, at a much larger scale.

What do you check in the logic gate and arithmetic tools?

That the truth tables are complete and that carries and borrows land in the right column. A half adder is XOR for the sum and AND for the carry, and the working in the calculator should match what the circuit does bit by bit.

What should students learn first?

The gates and their truth tables. Every larger circuit, from an adder to a multiplier, is built from them, and a wrong row in a truth table becomes a wrong answer everywhere that gate is used.