There’s no better way to learn than by doing, and that’s the approach taken in FPGA Prototyping By VHDL Examples. If you’re relatively new to FPGA prototyping, this book is a decent place to start. The caveat is that it does expect the reader to be relatively fluent in the syntax of HDLs. Given that prerequisite, the book will instruct you in the effective derivation of hardware using VHDL and the Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA family.
There’s three parts to the book. Part 1 introduces elementary HDL constructs and their hardware counterparts. It demonstrates the construction of a basic digital circuit with these constructs. Part 2 leads into applying the techniques from Part 1 to design an array of peripheral modules for a prototyping board. Each chapter in this section covers the development, implementation, and verification of an individual peripheral. Finally, Part 3 introduces the MicroBlaze FPGA-based soft-core microcontroller for the purpose of demonstrating the integration of a general-purpose processor and customization of the circuitry.
Brimming with code examples, flowcharts and other illustrations, the book serves as a good starting point for a development project. It’s recommended to anyone looking to get started with FPGA prototyping using VHDL. Just make sure you bring a little foreknowledge of VHDL and HDL constructs in general to the table.
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