Customer Reviews

Embedded Systems Design with Platform FPGAs: Principles and Practices

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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

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.

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.

This text is Xilinx specific and the way the chapters are laid out makes a lot of sense. The first part, on white pages, covers concepts and basic elements of the topic at hand. The second half of the chapter, on grey pages, go into the concepts from an application standpoint and illustrate real world applications with charts, coding, illustrations as well as considerable text dedicated to better illustrating the fundamentals of each chapter. There are step by step instructions so that the reader can duplicate the demonstrated ideas. It is bound with university quality materials and laid out in such a manner as to make it a great teaching aid as well as a great reference source.

The following publishing information is not available on Amazon so it is added as a courtesy:

Audience:
Embedded Software, Hardware and Systems Engineers, Designers, Developers and Architects, Field Application Engineers, Digital Designers, Upper-level Undergraduate and Graduate Students in Electrical & Computer Engineering

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Embedded Systems
1.2 Design Challenges
1.3 Platform FPGAs
1.A Spectrometer Example
1.B Introducing the Platform FPGA Tool Chain

Chapter 2: The Target
2.1 CMOS Transistor
2.2 Programmable Logic Devices
2.3 Field-Programmable Gate Array
2.4 Hardware Description Languages
2.5 From HDL to Configuration Bit stream
2.A Xilinx Virtex 5
2.B Xilinx Integrated Software Environment
2.C Creating and Generating Custom IP

Chapter 3: System Design
3.1 Principles of System Design
3.2 Control Flow Graph
3.3 Hardware Design
3.4 Software Design
3.A Platform FPGA Architecture Design
3.B Embedded GNU/Linux System

Chapter 4: Partitioning
4.1 Overview of Partitioning Problem
4.2 Analytical Solution to Partitioning
4.3 Communication
4.4 Practical Issues
4.A Profiling with Gprof
A.1 Simple Profiling
4.B Linux Kernel

Chapter 5: Spatial Design
5.1 Principles of Parallelism
5.2 Identifying Parallelism
5.3 Spatial Parallelism with Platform FPGAs
5.A Useful VHDL Topics for Spatial Design
5.B Debugging Platform FPGA Designs

Chapter 6: Managing Bandwidth
6.1 Balancing Bandwidth
6.2 Platform FPGA Bandwidth Techniques
6.3 Scalable Designs
6.A On-Chip Memory Access
6.B Off-Chip Memory Access

Chapter 7: Outside World
7.1 Point-to-Point Communication
7.2 Inter-Networking Communication
7.A High-Speed Serial Communication
7.B Low-Speed Communication

This is a good, solid text that covers the subject in a workmanlike manner. It gives a firm background in embedded systems design for students. The book covers both general principles and specific examples, in different colored pages.

For me, the book was interesting, but not particularly helpful. The most help for me were the design principles discussed. The examples given were not too helpful, because I did not have the need to do anything like them. And although I did not try the examples, it looked like the information given was a little sparse.

For those looking for a text to get them into the subject area of embedded systems using field programmable gate arrays, this book is as good as I've seen. Unfortunately, though, that is not saying a lot.

Embedded Systems Design with Platform FPGAs is a great teaching book for embedded programmers/engineers. If you are a manager looking for an overview, you could maybe get a little out of this book by reading the beginning of each chapter, but you're not the intended audience.

From the programmer's perspective, this is a great book, both as a reference and teaching tool - especially if you have an upcoming Xilinx project. This book is filled with instructions and example projects. That being said, we still had to have our experienced FPGA guy answer a question here and there, but maybe we didn't read throughly enough.

I had the book on my work bench, so for several weeks it was getting examined by myself and my comrades. The high quality pages held up well.

Overall, great reference to add to your toolkit.

I had been looking for a decent FPGA book for a long time and this one is really good. The layout is great and it has a straightforward approach. Covers Xilinx fpga's from A-Z in a logical and enjoyable way. I was able to get up to speed very easily. Quality book worth the money.

Do you remember in the 1980s when Programmable Logic Devices [PLDs] came onto the market? They had a neat way to define digital logic. The problem was that once you had done so, the circuit was fixed permanently. [Often, antifuses were the mechanism to implement the logic, and once an antifuse was used, it could not be changed.] Well, as the authors of this book explain, PLDs have been largely supplanted by Field Programmable Gate Arrays. The major advantage is that a circuit choice can be altered. The text does not actually spend much time explaining how this is done. Instead and correctly, it focuses on how to use or design an FPGA.

The text also explains that there are two common hardware description languages - VHDL and Verilog. The book uses VHDL exclusively; mostly to simplify the narrative. If your background is Verilog, you might choose to manually translate the example VHDL code snippets. It should be stressed that the book is still useful to a Verilog programmer.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of the book is how to partition a problem into hardware and software parts. The hardware logic is then implemented in the FPGA design, while the software executes 'above' this hardware. You might appreciate that the choices made in partitioning can greatly affect the overall performance of the circuit or chip.

Unlike the first texts written on FPGA, when the latter were introduced to the market, this book is up to date in describing complex logic blocks that can now be available on a given FPGA chip. These might be DSPs or even a microprocessor. So in some ways, the effective meaning of an FPGA has shifted. An original 'pure' FPGA did not have those blocks. But a pragmatic approach now offers a blended solution that you can avail in your design.