Customer Reviews

FPGAs: World Class Designs

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought of it as a "sampler plate", offering various interesting bits and pieces. It might be useful for someone completely new to FPGAs and digital design, who is not scared of jumping into a completely unknown domain. The book groups various chapters "hand-picked" by the author with the possible goal of giving an idea of the overall problem space.

That said, the content of the book is pretty non-uniform (hence the three stars) and probably less useful for a student or an experienced professional. If you are a newcomer and looking for a rigorous, progressive introduction in either FPGA or digital design, this is not the right book for you (you might want instead to look at books such as the two books FPGA Prototyping by VHDL (or Verilog) Examples by Pong P. Chu). If you have some expertise in the area, you might be turned off by the extreme diversity, and by the fact that many chapters are at an introductory level.

A few comments on the actual chapters:
- Chapter 1 is copied from Design warrior's guide to FPGAs by the same author. It's a pretty good intro (that chapter alone made me buy the book)
- Chapter 2 (copied from Designing with FPGAs and CPLDs by Bob Zeidman) Plus: great chapter on synchronous design, etc. Minus: 24 pages of unexplained Verilog code. The author doesn't even explain that the language used to write that code is Verilog, so a newbie could be very confused by this chapter.
- Chapter 3 nice VHDL intro (copied Design recipes for FPGA by Peter Wilson).
- Chapter 4 Modeling memories (from ASIC and FPGA verification, by Richard Munden). Interesting step-by-step description of how to model a SDRAM device using the VITAL2000 package. Unfortunately too brief. Hopefully the actual book contains more details.
- Chapter 5 (copied from Electrical Engineering Design by Richard Tinder). Arguably the best chapter in the book that justifies stuff like why a D-flip-flop is actually built that way, etc. Must-read. After reading this chapter I promptly ordered R. Tinder's book.
- Chapter 6 (from: Design recipes for FPGAs by Peter Wilson). The chapter goes through modeling a simple, minimal embedded CPU.
- Chaptes 7,8,9 on DSP, audio, video - haven't read them in detail, but they are again introductory chapters.
- Chapter 10 (from "The theory and practice of Reconfigurable Computing") - showcases using high-level design methodologies through a simple project for contour/edge detection implemented in Simulink