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Rating: 
Summary: The Best Book for VLSI design
Review: I am a student who has taken VLSI design course. Even we used another text book, I do feel Dr. Rabaey's book is the best within digital design area. It is very easy to understand and the system is so clear. This book can be used both for education or industry purposes,especially for the beginners.
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Summary: The 2nd Edition adds a lot
Review: I haven't seen the first edition of this book, but judging from reviews (all of which are dated before the 2nd Edition came out, which was December 2002), the 2nd Edition has added a lot of new material that addresses some of the criticisms of the first edition. I used a pre-publication draft of this book in a class with Professor Chandrakasan last fall, and it covered topics such as transistor sizing, crosstalk and transmission line effects, threshold voltage level effects, logic synthesis (though this book does not go into HDL design), and many other more advanced topics.It's also been made more up-to-date, removing a lot of the dated material some reviews on this page have been complaining about. Since I am just learning this material, I cannot comment on how relevant or complete this new edition really is, but I would urge anyone who was disappointed with the first edition to check out the 2nd edition. Actually, I'd urge everyone who used the first edition to check it out. From what I've seen, it's like a completely different book.
Rating: 
Summary: DIC is an average textbook
Review: Like most circuit design books, DIC doesn't cover issues that a serious circuit designer should know about. It does not mention or barely covers transistor sizing techniques, drive strengths for standard cell libraries, antenna rule checks, synthesis, and signal integrity issues like crosstalk. Sequencing elements like flipflops and latchs and memory design are covered poorly. Despite this, pipelining and parallelism are covered fairly effectively compared to other texts. Many other circuit design books are also fairly outdated now with respect to semiconductor technology. For instance at 10um cmos technology, leakage power is significant, but a casual reader would never know that you should increase the transistor threshold voltage or lengths on circuits on non-critical timing paths to control this nanometer effect.
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Summary: Much irrelevant material and skimps on important details
Review: There are a lot of formatting problems and typos in this book, a "hit and run" style of writing. But the main problem is the selection of material. When was the last time you saw a Josephson junction IC of any kind? or a bipolar digital IC? Why is this material in a book on digital ICs? It makes you wonder how well this book is in touch with reality and how well this book sees the future. If you can be that wrong about basic technology, how in touch can you be with circuit design? Ignoring the irrelevant material leaves a book that fails to cover modern digital design thoroughly. There's no coverage of VHDL or Verilog or logic synthesis. That leaves an academic treatment of non-mainstream dynamic CMOS circuit design, great for researchers, but not in real life. For digital IC design at a low level, I think the AW Weste and Eshragian text is still, after several years, very good. If you are interested in a high-level design, I think the book after Weste's on ASICs or the text from Smith at Veribest are better.
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Summary: Very good compilation of articles.
Review: This book is a must have for everyone planning to or currently designing vlsi high performance circuits. Covers initials/reviews of mos transistors from mid-to-deep physics to simple components and then to further more complicated circuits. Interesting to mention that the authors compile a set of related articles published on highly respected journals. Cons are that many times those coverage are superficial, condensed to one page and leads you to deeper research on the original references. Pros are that you have, in only one place, a whole compilation of good articles in the area. I think this is the most interesting aspect of the book, because once you study the concepts covered, you have good knowledge to understand those articles. Overall, the book outperforms many other books, both in coverage and in the level of detail on each topic.
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Summary: very good reference book for students and professionals
Review: This book serves a a very good reference for Digital ICs, especially for CMOS physical design. The book is very well organized and is very clear. It has a good breadth covering topics from physical design issues to system-level logic design issues. Overall, a very useful book anytime.
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Summary: An exellent treatment on the subject
Review: This is a well written text on the subject. The author's writing is easily understood. The chapters on different circuit design styles are very well written. In a single book the authors covers virtually all the essential topics in reasonable depth. It is by far the best book I've read on the subject. Highly recommended as a textbook or a professional reference
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is an excellent textbook for students and a good reference guide for circuit designer. It's hard to find a book that covers all the important materials about digital IC's in such a complete and systematic approach. The diagrams and examples in the book help readers to understand the subject. I have several other VLSI books but this one is the easiest to understand and yet it doesn't lose the depth it needs to cover for digital circuit design. A must have book if you are a student and trying to master the digital stuff. Great book!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for students!
Review: When I was in school the book served as an indispensable tools for my graduate work. Later I realized that all the concepts do not imply in the practical world. Nevertheless, this is a very good book.
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Summary: very nice textbook for undergrad students
Review: You are wrong if you think this book is out-of-date.
It contains all the information needed to get for a
undergrad. Of course, it doesn't cover all the concepts
, technology in digital circuit design. But you get
enough material to study for class (one or two semesters).
Most schools still use this book as textbook now.
Nice textbook to buy!
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