Looking at an FPGA to solve your problems? Need to learn VHDL? Then pick up Design Recipes For FPGAs by Peter Wilson. It is not an in-depth intro to VHDL and FPGA design. Instead, it’s a nice overview chock-full of useful hardware examples/recipes.
The book starts with the essentials of FPGA design and VHDL. It covers all the language details used in the rest of the book, which is ideal for novice FPGA designers. The chapter on design automation and testing is a good generic overview of the topic.
The flow then moves onto more interesting designs including a simple embedded processor – nothing fancy, but fully functional. The book then moves onto a host of other useful definitions including serial interfaces with various encoding schemes, digital filters, encryption, display interfaces and so on.
The tail end of the book goes into synthesis and optimization. It covers details like critical path analysis and standards like VHDL-AMS, and encompasses all topics worth covering while remaining and easy read with lots of code examples. It finally wraps up with a series of chapters on the basics like finite state machines and fixed-point arithmetic.
The approach is generic enough to be a good complement for any FPGA design tool you might use, assuming it will handle VHDL.
Reprints
