Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems

Rating:
Summary: A good text...
Review: This is a good text for beginners and slight intermediate users of VHDL. The text specifies the Altera UP1 board (which was the board I used as I atttended my EE program). I discovered this text a little late...when I have graduated and am now using VHDL on the job for CPLD programming. It is a good text for familiarizing with VHDL constucts. Examples are very good compared to the Student Guide to VHDL by Peter Ashenden. If you wish to learn VHDL, My suggestions are to get this text and either of the following:

VHDL for PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC by Kevin Skahill

Digital Design and Modeling with VHDL by K.C. Chang

With a solid background in digital logic, these text will provide you an excellent background in digital design. Good luck.

Rating:
Summary: MaxPlus II Review
Review: This is not a review of the book. This is a review of Altera MAXPLUS II software that you are going to use with the book. MAXPLUS II has a severe major drawback. It does not support HDL based testbench. You can not write Verilog or VHDL based testbench to test your design. But the Design Under Test (DUT) or Unit Under Test (UUT) supports both Verilog and VHDL. To test your design, you have to manually create waveforms or manually create test vector by explicitly generates all the bit patterns one by one. That's a very lame method and that's not how people in the industry do to test their designs. If you want support for HDL based testbench, buy Xilinx Student Edition or download the free Xilinx Webpack. They are much better tools!