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Does anyone here know a good entry-level book on FPGAs and VHDL or Verilog that covers best practices and implementing real world designs? In school I did some
by krisneuharth 17y ago
Does anyone here know a good entry-level book on FPGAs and VHDL or Verilog that covers best practices and implementing real world designs? In school I did some work with FPGAs and may have to brush up for an upcoming work project. I have "HDL Chip Design" by Douglas J. Smith from school but I am hoping there is something else out there that has helped people here.
- preview 17y agoOne book that I've seen recommend is A Verilog HDL Primer, Third Edition by J. Bhasker. Some books focus their attention on coding for simulation without giving synthesis its due. I have been told that this book does not make that mistake.
- samlittlewood 17y agoI found this very helpful: http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/book/bookse.htm http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/book/bookse.htm There is a third edition written around QuartusII - the current Altera software: http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/book/bookte.htm http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/book/bookte.htm I also found "The Designer's Guide to VHDL" (Ashenden) to be very useful for a deeper understanding of VHDL vs. the somewhat cookbook approach of the first book. Ashenden has also written "The Student's Guide to VHDL" - no idea how good that is. Some other links: http://www.opencores.org/ http://www.opencores.org/ Lots of VHDL and Verilog to examine http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ Re-creating arcade machines http://www.xess.com/ http://www.xess.com/ Nice development board (lots of good app. notes.) (I'm a satisfied customer)
- CamperBob 17y agoI've heard good things about that book by Douglas Smith but haven't looked at it yet. Out of several (expensive) books I do have, these are the ones that've been most helpful: - Verilog HDL Synthesis by Bhasker - FPGA Prototyping by Verilog Examples by Pong P. Chu - Advanced FPGA Design by Kilts - The two "Learning By Example using Verilog" books by Richard Haskell (these are actually written specifically for use with the Digilent Nexys2 board I mentioned in an earlier post) Many of the others are impractical, academic junk that waste your time with things like gate-level design, Karnaugh maps and the like that are handled by the synthesis tool nowadays. Unless you are writing a synthesis tool you don't need 75% of what's in most HDL textbooks.
- CamperBob 17y agoWell, thanks for swallowing carriage returns between lines that begin with "-". Maybe an elementary book on C programming would be a better starting point for whoever wrote this forum software.
- scott_s 17y agoThat would be this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- prodigal_erik 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc Blank lines separate paragraphs. Leading hyphens don't do anything. And asking Paul Graham to rewrite a web forum in C is like sending Lance Armstrong to Paris on a unicycle.
- jonjacky 17y agoSteve Kilts' Advanced FPGA Design is good on tradeoffs between time and space - he works through examples where he optimizes for each. Chandra Thimmannagari's CPU Design has a chapter on Verilog with many instructive short but nontrivial examples, in a novel compact format.