Customer Reviews

VHDL Design Representation and Synthesis (2nd Edition)

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This is a good book to get if you want to know what is involved with designing chips today using VHDL. It starts slowly, first establishing a taxonomy for the design process and very carefully defining its terms, then picks up as it moves into more depth. Combined with a good book dedicated to synthesis and a VHDL language reference (I recommend Chang for the former, Ashenden for the latter) you can come away with a very good understanding of VHDL and its uses.

Things that would have made it better are appendices with the NUMERIC_STD libraries and STD_LOGIC libraries detailed. A bit more depth in the synthesis area and some answers to at least some of the chapter questions in the back. Thus if you are teaching yourself VHDL as I am you will need to talk to a VHDL expert to verify your understanding.

With all that being said, I have no reservations recommending this book. You can probably skip chapters 1 & 2 if you are not a beginner and jump in at chapter 3. The use of comercially available FPGA design boards was a plus as well since I could "follow along" with the examples. Now if I could only find the student guide/lab book ...

This is a piss poor book. There are two main ways in which this book is inadequate: the physical makeup of the book itself, and the content of the book.

Physical Book
My book (along with a few friends from class) is very poorly put together. The binding is very rigid. This means that you have to break the binding in order to get the book to lay open. It looks like the publisher bound the inside pages of the book with one type of glue, then slapped the cover on with an excessive amount of a very stiff glue that does not allow the binding to flex at all.

The figures all look like they were scanned in off of a piece of paper on the worlds lowest quality scanner (they might have even been faxed), then reprinted in the book.

The printer used to print the book must have actually been a low quality photocopier because things that should be solid black are blotchy and unevenly printed.

On the first page of the book, it tells you that it used to come with a CD. Now it's been replaced with a general reference to a website that is difficult to navigate. The website it directs you to isn't for the book, it's for the publisher. In order to find the book, I suggest typing the ISBN number into the search box. Then you have to figure out how to convince it that you already bought the book and are trying to get to the CD contents.

Content
There are more than too many typographical errors for a competent editor to have looked at this book. Also, a lot of the code examples given have incorrect syntax or semantics. The book claims it was copyrighted in 2000, but doesn't list previous copyrights. I would be willing to bet the original book was copyrighted around 1990.

The problems included with the chapters get very in depth and lengthy (and downright stupid). Unfortunately for the book, I have an incompetent professor who assigns problems without looking into the amount of effort required. We've been given assignments where we're expected to design a processor in only a week.

Summary
If this book is required for your class, I feel sorry for you. You probably should buy the book so you can do the homework the professor assigns. If you're looking for a reference for your personal use, I suggest going elsewhere.

For the new beginner or senior engineer in electronic field, learn this new knowlegde is essential.