The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs

Description:

...a must-read book for those designers who either want an introduction to designing with FPGAs or need to broaden their understanding of the EDA tools available for such applications. Maxfield writes in a easy-to-read style, and provides insightful and diverse information for designers and curious readers alike. The author has never forgotten his designer roots, and the book is full of examples and chapters dedicated to such applications as gigabit transceivers, linear-feedback-shift registers, and integration of third-party cores. -- EDN, 5/21/2004

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are devices that provide a fast, low-cost way for embedded system designers to customize products and deliver new versions with upgraded features, because they can handle very complicated functions, and be reconfigured an infinite number of times. FPGAs have recently become much faster and more powerful, making them suitable for use with a wide range of embedded products. This has created a rapidly expanding market in the embedded world as products migrate to these flexible parts, and a need for designers to educate themselves quickly about working with FPGAs - which they can do with this book.

Clive "Max" Maxfield is a bestselling author and engineer with a large following in the electronic design automation (EDA)and embedded systems industry. In this comprehensive book, he covers all the issues of interest to designers working with, or contemplating a move to, FPGAs in their product designs. While other books cover fragments of FPGA technology or applications this is the first to focus exclusively and comprehensively on FPGA use for embedded systems.

 

Introductio; Fundamental Concepts; The Origin of FPGAs; Alternative FPGA Architectures; Programming (Configuring) an FPGA; Who Are All the Players?; FPGA Versus ASIC; HDL-Based Design Flows; Silicon Virtual Prototyping; C/C++ etc.–Based Design Flows;
DSP-Based Design Flows; Embedded Processor-Based; Modular and Incremental Design; High-Speed Design and Other PCB Considerations; Observing Internal Nodes in an FPGA; Intellectual Property; Migrating ASIC Designs to FPGAs and Vice Versa; Simulation, Synthesis, Verification, etc.; Choosing the Right Device; Gigabit Transceivers; Reconfigurable Computing; Creating an Open-Source-Based
Design Flow; Future FPGA Developments; Appendix A:
Signal Integrity 101;Capacitive and inductive coupling(crosstalk), Chip-level effects, Board-level effects, The evolution of delay specifications; Appendix B: Deep-Submicron Delay Effects 101, A potpourri of definitions, Alternative interconnect models, DSM delay effects
Summary, The Ouroboras, Many-to-one implementations; Appendix C: Linear Feedback Shift Registers 101, More taps than you know what to do with, Seeding an LFSR, FIFO applications, Modifying LFSRs to sequence 2n values, Accessing the previous value, Encryption and decryption applications,
Cyclic redundancy check applications.
Data compression applications
Built-in self-test applications
Pseudorandom-number-generation applications
Last but not least
Glossary
About the Author
Index