I can tell this is really going to be a long and ongoing discussion.....but
actually should be of great interest to alot of us.

John, and others, the selection of devices is dependant on alot of things.
What voltage are you running? 5V? 3.3V 2.5V? 1.8V?  Is it battery operated?
Do you care about power consumption?  Some parts are more noisy than others.
I would first off, suggest subscribing to some of the more informative
journals, such as EDN, EET and so on. In fact, EET has an emailing list to
give the high points of the next issue.  TI offers a similar mail list, you
choose what devices or products are of interest, and they mail out
information every now and then on those topics.

Now, selection of the devices.  As I mentioned before, you can split them
into the voltage ranges first. Second is speed. Some are faster than others,
some slower.  Faster is usually more expensive.  I'm using some buffers,
250ps prop delay.  I did have some that had 2.5ns, but it was too much
delay.  The new ones cost more, but it is a tradeoff.  Some
registers/buffers have built in termination.  Do you need to worry about
that?  maybe, maybe not.  TI has a neat new series of parts that really have
sweet looking edges, controlled skew and such, but alas, they run on 2.5.
OK, I'll keep that in mind for a design that uses 2.5 volts.

There are a wide variety of logic families to choose from, and families
within those.  Just look at the specs to see what fills the bill.
Availability is also something to always consider.

Sometimes, I will use parts that I have used in the past that have worked
for a similar application.  When you do finally choose a part, don't assume
that it won't affect the remainder of the circuits.  Do a simple timing
analysis to be sure you don't violate setups and hold times.


My current design, has four clock domains from 25MHz to 100 Mhz, mixes 5V
and 3.3V, will end up being a 12 layer board, 99% surface mount, analog and
digital domains, separate ground planes for them, PLL's.  FPGA's and CPLS's
designed in verilog.  So, I've got a pretty good variety of stuff on this
card....

So good luck, and hope your job becomes more interesting!  Oh....on a side
note, of the nearly 10 years that I have been here, spent the first 4 doing
software, some minor hardware, then a few years in intensive hardware
design, went back to software, and then for the last year or so, intensive
hardware design. Don't knock the software. Allot of the chip designs and
verifications are all done in software HDL, such as verilog or VHDL.
Hardware engineering is now a good mixture of both.