Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is full of examples, completely worked out. That's valuable. However, I wanted to point out what you won't find in this book, so that you'll look elsewhere if you need it. As I should have.
Most important: There is NO discussion of synthesis at all. None. You will not learn from this book which Verilog constructs are synthesizable, or how they are synthesized. You may very well get the impression from this book that everything you do in Verilog can be made into hardware, because the book never says otherwise. In fact, take a hint from the subtitle of this book: it contains the word "modeling" and does not contain the word "synthesis". You will not learn, for example, that the reg type does not necessarily synthesize into a register - which is key knowledge if you want to use combinatorial logic in a always block and are worried that needing to use a reg type means it will be clocked. I had to look to the web to discover this.
Next: Book is copyrighted 2007 but as far as it is concerned Verilog-2001 doesn't exist. Verilog-2001 has a lot of nice syntax and feature improvements. No reason to be limited to earlier Verilog syntax/semantics any more, but you won't learn anything about it here. (It would have made the examples shorter too.)
Finally: There is no discussion of the Verilog "gotchas", as described with terrific explanations in the papers by Sutherland, Mills, and Spear. (Google for "Standard Gotchas Verilog" and "More Gotchas Verilog".) It would really be nice in this textbook to have coverage of the several of these common issues, especially sign-extension (or non-extension) when connecting or operating with nets/regs of different sizes, and also the issues of case fullness or parallelness. (The papers came out contemporary with the book, I'm not suggesting that the author should have copied the papers here, but surely he knew of these issues independently and could have covered them.)
Anyway - books in the HDL field (or maybe just Verilog) seem to be poor in general, for a variety of reasons. This one isn't badly written, it just doesn't cover some important stuff. And in particular, it doesn't cover synthesis (esp. in the FPGA context), which is what I was looking for.
Oh, one more thing. 70 pages are devoted to "gate level modeling". Wow. There must be some reason to have that stuff in the language; it must be useful to someone. But I sure don't know why anyone needs to use it, especially not the beginning students that this book is aimed at. And the same for K-maps. K-maps have a long history and they're very useful if you're optimizing gates by hand. But now we have logic compilers (i.e., Verilog/VHDL compilers) and I can't see any reason why you can't just go from state machine diagrams to synthesizable code without ever touching a K-map. Looking at the diagrams in this book you'd think they were crucial. Very odd.
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Emphasizing the detailed design of various Verilog projects, Verilog HDL: Digital Design and Modeling offers students a firm foundation on the subject matter. The textbook presents the complete Verilog language by describing different modeling constructs supported by Verilog and by providing numerous design examples and problems in each chapter. Examples include counters of different moduli, half adders, full adders, a carry lookahead adder, array multipliers, different types of Moore and Mealy machines, and much more. The text also contains information on synchronous and asynchronous sequential machines, including pulse-mode asynchronous sequential machines.In addition, it provides descriptions of the design module, the test bench module, the outputs obtained from the simulator, and the waveforms obtained from the simulator illustrating the complete functional operation of the design. Where applicable, a detailed review of the topic's theory is presented together with logic design principles, including state diagrams, Karnaugh maps, equations, and the logic diagram. Verilog HDL: Digital Design and Modeling is a comprehensive, self-contained, and inclusive textbook that carries all designs through to completion, preparing students to thoroughly understand this popular hardware description language.
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