Customer Reviews

Rapid System Prototyping with FPGAs: Accelerating the design process (Embedded Technology)

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I am new to the world of FPGAs and Hardware Description Languages. I got this book looking to get a better idea of what FPGAs are, how to select one FPGA over another, how to program in VHDL or Verilog, how to use VHDL simulator or an FPGA synthesis tool (like Quartus II) to design, model, simulate, and test simple digital circuits, how to get started with this whole process with cookbook examples, how to design and fabricate a simple test board to actually program FPGAs, etc. None of these "beginner getting started" issues were addressed in the book. There are no examples and no end of chapter problems. This book might be useful for the more experienced FPGA engineer who is seeking to learn the most efficient and optimal methodologies to take a project from concept through design to fabrication and protyping, but for a beginner like myself, it has not been very helpful. To make a comparison, this book explains FPGAs the way I might envision a poor calculus teacher explaining the concepts of the derivative and the integral without ever using algebra, examples, or practice problems - but only paragraphs and pictures. A good teacher must assist the student learning the unknown from what is already known. Either the authors wrote this book for more advanced readers, or they are just poor teachers. This book is not helpful for beginners.

Does anyone know of any good FPGA books for beginners?

This book is a good book for the experienced designer who has been on several projects and is familiar with the many terms and jargon in the book. The book lists many process steps, and has checklists that are useful for organizing many different types of design efforts. A person new to FPGA, might be advised to get an introductory book or two prior to proceeding to this level of detail, in-order to fill in many key concepts that are assumed as common knowledge by the authors. My one wish would be for a new edition to cover the many developments out since publication in this fast moving field.

I am a newbie to digital circuits. This book is too ambitious and talks too less about the detail, and each chapter may be extended to a book. For example, the authors talks about QFP and BGA package in chapter 6, but they did not mentioned others like DIP, SMP, TQFP, or the newest flip-chip. If you have no ideal about the IC package, you may loss in it. Take another example : Figure 16.6 "serial I/O interface" and Table 16.4 "OSI model and TCP/IP layer implementation" in page 235. If you have no idea of why 8B/10B encode/decode using in FPGA/CPLD, or if you have no ideal of TCP/IP, it is impossible for you to know what is the key point in this chapter. The same situations are seem in other chapters.
Well, the useful things is the "checklist" in each chapter, or collected in Appendix-B. I think it may be help for the experienced guys.
The other helpful things is some comparison of the different FPGAs, but they are hidden in the chapter 13 to 16. The experience discussion are useful, even for beginner.
Anyway, it is a great introduction book, if there is a teacher guiding you through this book.