The Designer's Guide to VHDL

Peter J. Ashenden

Back Cover Text

From the foreword by Paul Menchini:

VHDL has evolved...into one of the two pre-eminent [hardware description languages] in use throughout the world. [It] will continue to provide the expressive facilities needed by state-of-the-art designs well into the next century....A Designer's Guide to VHDL is ideal for the non-programmer wishing to learn VHDL...Welcome to VHDL!

The Designer's Guide to VHDL is both a comprehensive manual for the language and an authoritative reference on its use in hardware design at all levels, from system level down to gate level. Using the IEEE standard for VHDL, the author presents the entire description language and builds a modeling methodology based on successful software engineering techniques. Requiring only a minimal background in programming, this is an excellent tutorial for anyone in computer architecture, digital systems engineering, or CAD.

The book is organized so that it can either be read cover to cover for a comprehensive tutorial or be kept deskside as a reference to the language. Each chapter introduces a number of related concepts or language facilities and illustrates each one with examples. Scattered throughout the book are four case studies, which bring together preceding material in the form of extended worked examples. All of the examples and case studies, complete with test drivers for running the VHDL code, are available via the World Wide Web. In addition, each chapter is followed by a set of rated exercises.