Customer Reviews

Principles of Verilog PLI

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Swapnajit, First congratulations on your book. This is a major progress in documenting and demistifying the PLI mechanism. The examples of your book are excelent starting points. I grade myself as a medium expert in PLI. So I am still waiting for a second, higher-class book to cover more advanced topics. One of them is multiple instances of a module containing a PLI call and hence multiple instances of the same C code. My problems started when data belonging to one instance interfered with data belonging to other instance. Actually I would like to see in your next book or revision some tips about this issue. In general some good PLI coding practices would be wellcomed. I also encountered race conditions in which the order of the PLI C routines calling influenced the behaviour, and hence not reliable. The second subject I liked very much in your book is the communication between verilog processes. The actual application I hoped to be able to put to work is a kind of "software -hardware coverification" (for poors). Actually I have a PLI that mimics the bus activity of a CPU and now I want it to run real C program. I would like that C program to run in a different environment from the simulator, and only on CPU-read and CPU-write to enable a handshake mechanism. Since I am not a TCP IP socket expert I dropped the effort after a couple of days, when I reached the notorious deadlock of both processes waiting for one another... I would also like to see in the next revision tips about debugging, and some NOT-TO-DOs. I encountered some problems when using parameters in verilog that are passed also to PLI's. I think you may add some words about this as well. All in all I enjoyed the book. Keep up ! Last but not least thank you for your answers to my e-mails regarding the PLI stuff. I also appreciate your activity in the comp.lang.verilog forum.

Save your money and buy the Stuart Sutherland book "The Verilog PLI Handbook" ISBN 0-7923-8489-X it's much better. I have both.

Absolutely essential for anybody seeking to learn the fundamentals of Verilog PLI. Various usages of Verilog PLI including different types of library functions :access and utility routines as well as VPIs are extensively covered with numerous detailed examples. The reviewer found the book to be a well read and lucidly written.

This is a very useful book for those who want to learn intricacies of Verilog PLI without spending hours on reading manuals. The best part of this book that I liked is its set of examples - almost all functions and their uses have been explained with an easy-to-understand example. Most of these examples are presented in their bare-bone structure so that users can customize them according to their needs. A more careful look at the examples would reveal that the author has subtly divided them into two categories - one for the beginners and the other for the more advanced users.

Overall, I will recommend this book to anybody who wants to learn Verilog PLI.

I found the book very useful because of the lots of examples, informal presentation(helps beginners), seperate chapter on BFM, coverage for both PLI1.0 and PLI2.0 and exercise (Self-check) to measure progress.

I am of the opinion that this book would be a worthy investment for a quick start in hardware design.