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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Modern Text On Designing Embedded Systems With FPGA's, December 15, 2010
This review is from: Embedded Systems Design with Platform FPGAs: Principles and Practices (Hardcover)
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With the current low costs and ubiquity of special purpose computing systems based upon embedded hardware, there is a significant need to educate engineers and others just getting into designing special purpose systems toward efficient and high quality designs of embedded hardware. I give this high-quality modern text top marks for describing and giving examples of the best practices in using Platform FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays used as the central component of an embedded computing system) in the design of systems appropriate to this implementation. I would have also liked to have better metrics for the novice designer to select between fixed instruction set commercial microprocessor and microcontroller solutions and custom embedded solutions based upon a FPGA.
As a text for the novice in designing Embedded Computing solutions with FPGA's and partitioning solutions between purchased IP-cores,
custom logic designed in a HDL and software, this text performs an excellent job in giving specific examples using Xilinx Platform FPGA's , VHDL logic specification, the GNU C Compiler and Linux-based development environments. It then generalizes each of these steps of FPGA development to allow the developer to use other FPGA development families, Verilog HDL or other development tools as they choose.
I would recommend this text highly as a means to getting into Embedded Systems Development with Platform FPGA's given only a basic background in software and computer architecture. It still must be supplemented with trade press articles or formal instruction in the metrics of when to choose an embedded solution based on standardized processor architectures and when to choose a customized (optimized) approach using Platform FPGA's.
--Ira Laefsky,MSE/MBA
IT & HCI Consultant & Reseacher formerly on the Senior Staff of Arthur D. Little, Inc and Digital Equipment Corporation
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
would be good for senior-level college computer arch class, March 3, 2011
This review is from: Embedded Systems Design with Platform FPGAs: Principles and Practices (Hardcover)
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This book is built around a novel concept. In white pages the authors present concepts and materials that are likely to be true for several years to come. In grey pages they present material more focused on specific tools, operating systems, and a Xilinx FPGA. This should extend the shelf life of the book, making it easier for profs to tell their classes what to read & skip.
In the book the authors cover a sweeping array of topics, presenting real-world issues that are often not encountered in logic design and computer architecture books. Principles of system design, partitioning, speedup thru hardware, all of these topics and more are addressed. This makes the book useful for a senior level class so that students have some understanding of these important issues before they enter the workforce.
The book also give an introduction to how to configure and use the Xilinx Virtex 5 family of FPGAs. It has quite detailed instructions on how to set up the Xilinx evaluation board and configure the part. It culminates in a simple design example of a simple adder interfacing to a CPU core. I wish the example had been a bit more involved, including accessing data from an external device and then performing a computation since this is a more likely real-world scenario.
In order to get the most out of this book I think students would need to have already completed a programming class, a digital design class, and a computer architecture class. The high level concepts introduced in the book are important for students to learn, but on the flip side the more limited presentation of the Xilinx FPGA specific topics doesn't provide enough detail for the practicing engineer to read the book and then be able to design systems taking full advantage of the FPGA family. So I would recommend this for college classes where the expectation is that students will produce a minimal functioning system, but not for those who really want in-depth knowledge of how to use the parts in this family.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's like being in class (assuming you like being in class), January 27, 2011
This review is from: Embedded Systems Design with Platform FPGAs: Principles and Practices (Hardcover)
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When reading this book I felt as if I had a professor teaching a class. It does a good job at explaining FPGAs, starting from the transistor, getting into LUTs, slices, etc. It gives a high-level view of VHDL and Verilog but its goal is not to teach you that. For those of us used to program general purpose processors, the book provides the differences in mentality when using an FPGA. Each chapter of the book starts with topics that are foundational and supposed to withstand obsolescence. The end of each chapter, however, also provides an example of a project using a FPGA kit to illustrate the concepts learned.
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