Customer Reviews

RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL: Coding for Efficiency, Portability, and Scalability

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This book focuses on the IEEE 1076.6 VHDL RTL synthesis standard. If you want to do behavioral modeling, look to Peter J. Ashenden's Designer's Guide to VHDL. If you want to make circuits that work. This is your book. VHDL is a complex language that can be used for different purposes. Actual hardware design is only one of these purposes. So if that's what you want to do, get this book that focuses on that particular aspect of the language.

There are plenty of End of Chapter exercises that are challenging but doable. Topics are in depth and good design practices are taught alongside good coding style.

This is an excellent book for digital IC designer using
VHDL at the RT level. It does not cover the full VHDL
syntax, but it gives a lot of information on how to design
a digital ASIC using VHDL.

The world is well populated with books on elementary logic design, Katz's being one of the good ones. Such books present all the basics of hardware logic, registers, computer arithmetic, and maybe a little about a popular hardware description language (HDL), Verilog or VHDL. Then there are the language books that take basic logic concepts and show how to render them in one of the HDLs. Unfortunately, there's not much out there for the student who's mastered the basics, but isn't ready to dive in at the deep end of computer architecture.

Chu's book meets the needs of that advancing student better than any other I know. After introductory chapters that orient the reader and set expectations, Chu dives in with a quick tour of VHDL basics. These 'basics', by the way, cover more detail than some entire texts. The next chapters cover principles and practice of combinational and sequential circuits, state machine design, register transfer level (RTL) design, and hierarchical design, with emphasis throughout on timing and efficient design. For example, sharing of functional units comes up as a topic in itself, something that arises in practice but rarely in the classroom. Toward the end, Chu presents the best discussion of parameterized design I've seen, including fairly advanced use of 'generate' statements and VHDL's alternative architectures. The last chapter covers design considerations for clock distribution and for crossing between clock domains, topics that arise in every non-trivial design and that continue to cause problems for designers.

This book covers its topics better than any other I know. The beginning logic designer's first course has been well covered, and (except for use of HDLs) hasn't changed all that much since about 1980. The digital world has changed dramatically, though, and this book does a great job starting where other texts leave off.

- wiredweird