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Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by krisneuharth on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @05:32PM (#704659)
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.
Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by samlittlewood on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @06:16PM (#704731)
I found this very helpful:

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

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/ Lots of VHDL and Verilog to examine

http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ Re-creating arcade machines

http://www.xess.com/ Nice development board (lots of good app. notes.) (I'm a satisfied customer)

Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by preview on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @06:03PM (#704710)
One 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.
Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by jonjacky on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @06:39PM (#706763)
Steve 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.

Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by CamperBob on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:31PM (#705013)
I'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.

Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by CamperBob on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:32PM (#705015)
Well, 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.
Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by prodigal_erik on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @03:06AM (#705303)
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.

Re:FPGAs for fun & hacking by scott_s on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:57PM (#705041)