Customer Reviews

Vhdl: Analysis and Modeling of Digital Systems (Mcgraw Hill Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Background info:
I have been an ASIC engineer since 1986. I have designed many ASICs in Verilog and VHDL. I have 7 books on VHDL including Dr. Navabi's text.

Some of the VHDL books out there are more like cookbooks: too many code examples and not enough explanation. Navabi's book is NOT a cookbook.

Further, it is hard to do a direct comparison to other VHDL texts. In a way it would be like comparing apples and oranges. While some VHDL texts try to explain everything about VHDL, other books like Dr. Navabi's explain the more useful parts of VHDL as being used by a digital systems or ASIC designers. While other books are mostly for RTL coders with very little testbench and system level modeling info. In my opinion, test is extremely important as well as modeling at the system level. Many books out there do not do a good job on those aspects. Most books provide very brief explanations of test benches and/or system level modeling.

This book is highly useful for a digital systems design engineer or architect. This book is not only covers coding for RTL synthesis but doing the testbenches, and sytem level modeling as well. This book has a very good balance between all the main uses of the VHDL modeling langauage.

Here is my overview of the chapters :
The first two chapters provides you with a history of modeling languages and the reason VHDL was created. I recommend that you read these chapters, especially if this is your first modeling language. The chapters are not long, but it provides a very good high level overview to modeling, synthesis, and test.

Chapter three gets you up and running quickly by providing simple examples to give you a good introduction to behavioral and structural VHDL.

Chapters 4 though 9 are heart of the VHDL aspect of the book.

Chapter 4 is very important. It describes VHDL inertial and concurrent timing in great detail. In fact, I believe Dr. Navabi's book is the best available in this aspect! It is important to understand for modeling and especially testing purposes. Chapter 5 is on structural VHDL. it is a good place to start since it is the easiest to understand. Chapter 6 introduces procedures, functions, packages, generics, and configurations. I like the way this chapter is written. Other books are not as easy to read as this one. Great examples and its clearly written as is the entire book actually. Chapter 7 digs into the VHDL types, operators, and attributes. Chapter 8 covers guarding and signal resolution. It also provides a good state machine example. Once you get through Chapter 8, pat yourself on the back because you got through the hard parts of VHDL! VHDL is a harder language to learn than Verilog. But for good reason, VHDL is much more powerful and structured than Verilog in my opinion. You can code faster in Verilog, but the code is not typically as readable as VHDL. Most of the VHDL codes I have seen are much more readable. Some of the Verilog code I have seen are downright nasty looking and time consuming to interpret. Chapter 9 starts to put it (chapters 6-8) all together by more thorough examples behavioral modeling: testbenches/harnesses, arbitration/handshaking, etc.

Chapters 10-11 puts it all together with some system examples : cpu, dma, system bus modeling/timing/interfacing, etc. even memory caches! These are not complicated examples but they are real world examples. All of the techniques are still begin used today. If they were more complicated examples the book would need to be much bigger. However, these are great examples that ties everything up. Once you complete chapter 11, you are well on your way! You will have accomplished something!

Don't overlook Chapters 12 (advanced modeling) and the appendices (esp. App. B, the synthesis subset). This additional information puts Navabi's book above other VHDL books in my opinion.

Conclusion:
It is difficult to create a VHDL book to be 'the' book for all types and levels of designers and engineers (architectural, RTL coders, testbench and verification, etc.) But, in my opinion this book comes closest. I highly recommend this book! I have many books on VHDL. This book is valuable to me as a reference and has helped me tremendously - it's a keeper! All the codes work and I only found one insignificant typo. I can not say that about any of my other VHDL books. In fact, I will probably soon be getting rid of some of my VHDL books to make space on my shelves for new books. I'll be keeping Navabi's VHDL book as a permanent reference- for sure! I recommend this book for beginners because I like the way it progresses and delivers the material: in the right order and in the right amount. I recommend this book for moer advanced people as well, I am sure that it has material that is not covered in other VHDL books. And it makes a great reference as well.

P.S.
There are recent additions to VHDL that are not discussed in this book..namely VHDL-AMS, which adds analog extentions. However, it is still very young and most simulators do not support the analog extentions yet.

A really good text book is worth its weight in ....well maybe not gold but definetely more than silver. I can count on one hand the really great textbooks I have used in over 4 years of Electrical Engineer education (two others being "Fundamentals of Logic Design" by Charles H. Roth, Jr. and "Computer Systems Design and Architecture" by Vincent Heuring and Harry Jordan).

Having previously taken a VHDL class, I showed up for work and quickly realized I didn't know Diddly about how to USE VHDL. I felt like an idiot. Having purchased this book, 70% of the gaps in my knowledge have been address by the end of the third chapter. What I read in the text yesterday, I use ON THE JOB today. Having made it about halfway through the text, I can easily read and understand the code of my fellow Engineers and am starting to contribute meaningful code of my own.

This book is not intended to teach you Digital Logic (for that, see Logic Design by Roth (above)). It will teach you how to USE Digital Logic in Programmable Devices. By the way, where I work we have over 8000 Electrical and Computer Engineers. All Digital Hardware is designed in VHDL. If you don't think you will have to Master VHDL to become or continue as a Digital Hardware Designer, think again.

The material is this book is presented in a coherent and straightforward manner. It is thorough in its discussion of material while written in easy to understand prose. Key topics are driven home by use of well-planned examples. While agressive in its presentation, it is by no means overwhelming. I recommend this text both for students and those who wish to round out their VHDL knowledge.

We looked at this book as one of the candidates for a final-year class in VHDL. It had the advantages of being cheap and widely available. In the end we rejected it. It focuses only on writing code and not about any of the ideas underlying design or synthesis technology. As such we felt it would not give our students any deep understanding of the subject nor any transferable skills.

This book is an excellent book for beginners to VHDL. It is written in such a way that it presents the development and nuances of the VHDL language sequentially and ties some of the history of the language into the examples. It is very useful when you want to know why the syntax works the way it does. My only criticism is that it can be difficult to find examples when using it as a desk reference. I often found myself thinking, "I remember reading how to do this, but I can't seem to find it now." I would highly recommend this book if you can dedicate the time to read it cover-to-cover as it makes things easier to find when you need them.

Even though I've been writing VHDL in industry for 10 years now, I learned a lot by reading this book. I think there are other books, "A VHDL Synthesis Primer" by Bhasker that are more compact design references, but this book is a must have for comprehensive language coverage and some of the more powerful concepts that often aren't covered by other references. It is also an invaluable tool if you plan on doing any test bench development or complex modeling (i.e. transistor, or gate level logic simulation).

In summary, I would highly recommend this book. If you can dedicate the time to read it cover-to-cover it will help you become a better VHDL coder.

I recently used this text for a design class using VHDL. The text is easy to read, has a good flow from topic to topic, and contains many useful examples that help explain the issues.

I recently used this book for a class and found the book had a lot of detail and was easy to read. There were lots of examples to demonstrate different concepts of VHDL that were easy to understand. The only complaint is the index seems to be bit sparse and can be hard to find specific concepts.

I knew nothing about VHDL before reading this book.Now I know how to design a small CPU.

This book is very practical for those who just start to learn VHDL. Different from many VHDL books, which just provide general command statement explaination, this book combined the language with very detailed and useful examples.

Moreover, it focuses more on system design rather than VHDL language. The book starts with designing small components such as counter, adder, ends with a complete CPU. After reading this book, I have got a better concept about the timing and architecture of the system.

So in a word, a good book.

I usually never get far along through my college textbooks, but I found this one very interesting. It provides a good overview of the VHDL programming language, going into detail on many of the more confusing aspects, such as multiple driver resolution.

As a programming language, I wasn't particularly fond of the way VHDL handled many issues. The concept of configurations seemed unnecessary, and I didn't like how it automatically dropped so many assignments to a signal. Coming from an object-oriented programming background, I think I might have preferred Verilog, which Prof. Navabi also teaches a course in, actually.

This book was used for a grad-level course and I had no difficulty reading it most of the time.

I had no VHDL experience and it was very helpful to read and learn from this book.

I wish the topics could've been organized and introduced better and geared more toward practical daily designers.

I hope the following editions of this book does some more topics on verification and post synthesis studies.

Due to my engineering work nature, I'm currently reading "VHDL for Programmable Logic" by Kevin Skahill, which is more hands-on in explaining programmable logic and how to write VHDL for synthesis. It's a good companion and a followup to this book.

This book is an easy read and could be used as a self-help guide for someone trying to learn VHDL on his/her own.

Examples provided in the book illustrate code cases that are both clever and insightful. They make one think about the code and comprehend it in a straightful manner.

This book is a very good buy.