Digital Design by Frank Vahid University of California, Riverside John Wiley and Sons Publishers http://www.ddvahid.com Book's site at Wiley     VHDL companion or standalone book     Verilog companion or standalone book

The book's cover graphically depicts Moore's Law.

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Key Unique Features

• Top-down design perspective : The book, while fully bottom up starting from transistors, emphasizes a top-down design perspective, which dominates modern digital design. It shows how to capture behavior, and to convert that behavior to structure, at each of several abstraction levels. The books reaches register-transfer level (RTL) design in just five chapters, while still being bottom-up. Teaching basic RTL design in an introductory digital course gives students a better appreciation of how computers work, and introduces students to the modern digital design field including embedded systems design. One hope is that the book will attract more computing-oriented students to the field, needed to create the high-performance low-power applications common in digital systems today, like PDAs, video games, medical instruments, cell phones, network switches, automobiles, etc. RTL can be reached due to de-emphasis on outdated design skills or tricks (like implementing sequential circuits directly using RS or JK flip-flops rather than a register), and by moving minimization to a later, more modern chapter on size/performance/power optimization and tradeoffs at all levels of design (rather than just emphasizing two-level logic minimization).
• Enables flexible HDL coverage: Coverage of VHDL, Verilog, and SystemC, exists in a separate chapter whose subsections correspond to earlier chapters (e.g., Chpt 2 can be followed by 9.2, 3 by 9.3, 4 by 9.4, and 5 by 9.5). Instructors can thus cover HDLs earlier, later, or not at all, can choose their HDL, and can even switch HDLs without switching books -- while the book's chapters stay focused on design concepts without being cluttered by language details.
  Furthermore, a 180-page VHDL introduction book and a 180-page Verilog introduction book are available to be bundled with the Digital Design book for nearly the same price, for instructors seeking more in-depth HDL coverage. The HDL introduction books follow the same chapter organization as the Digital Design book, using many of the same examples and the same terminology, and come with extensive figure and code laden PowerPoint slides too. The HDL books can also be used standalone.

Additional Unique Features

• Utilizes examples to reinforce learning, which is a more interesting and effective way to learn.
• Separates basic design from optimization, unlike most books that intertwine logic design and logic minimization. This book presents optimizations and tradeoffs in a separate chapter, teaching (still concretely) the broader important concept. Instructors have flexibility to introduce optimization earlier or later, as the chapter's sections each follow an earlier chapter (Chpt 2 can be followed by 6.2, 3 by 6.3, 4 by 6.4, and 5 by 6.5).
• Emphasizes the human aspect of engineering , by focusing on useful real applications, like pacemakers, ultrasound machines, and DVD players, and by including designer profiles that emphasize the engineering teamwork.
• Shows how FPGAs work from the bottom up, demystifying these increasingly common and important devices.

Comments from Teachers and Industry

More Information and Resources

First Edition Errata and Clarifications

Frank Vahid's Home Page