FPGA

Embedded Core Design with FPGAs
$99.95
"Embedded Core Design with FPGAs" written by Dr. Zainalabedin Navabi is an excellent book to learn FPGA based Embedded system design. This book covers everything a person needs to know for learning FPGAs.

It explains logic design concepts first. Even if a person is very new to the digital field, he/she will be able to start right from there. Then the chapter named RTL design with Verilog, gives an opportunity to learn a hardware description language named Verilog right from this book. This chapter is so well written that no other separate book on verilog is necessary to learn.

This book explains very well how the Field Programmable Devices work. It has lots of examples to work with and program with Altera UP3 and DE2 board. These examples have made this book a unique one, because most of the books only provide examples, but this one shows how one can really use an FPGA board and provides step by step procedure to run those example in the FPGA board.

This book also has a chapter to design with Embedded processors. Embedded design steps were shown brilliantly with examples like design of a microcontroller etc.

Overall, this is a very good book on Embedded system design which covers topics like logic design to learning verilog to using FPGA boards to designing embedded processors.

FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx Spartan-3 Version
$90.50
I have spent many years amassing a collection of every book on FPGA on the market! Ok, maybe that's pushing it...However, compared to what most books lack in practical examples, this one I find is a complete GEM! From the beginning to the end it keeps you going with interesting, real world examples of what can be done with a Digilent Spartan Starter Kit. The author, Prof. P. Chu does an excellent job at progressivelly building your understanding of FPGA logic design, through a series of chapters that gradually take you to the more advanced stages of design in easily comprehensible lessons that require more elevated skills as one approaches the end chapters. The beauty of this book is that it uses the lessons learned prior to take you to the next level. I've used Prof. Chu's samples and interfaced them with a PIC and ARM9 development boards respectivelly, just to spice in some more fun and excitement. I may be considering launching a free site for the microcontroller sample code interfacing to his functional FPGA examples with his prior consent! There are lessons on dealing with numbers, such as the illusive negative integers and floats represented in binary logic. These are not borring discussions. They are well explained and straight to the point, complete with test benches and some of them can even be ran in the Xilinx simulator. The muxing example for LEDs should be the starting point of all experiments. It's that useful! The chapter on circular buffers is alone worth the price of the book! The memory interfacing and the VGA interfacing are priceless chapters as well! Try looking at a Xilinx sample for memory interfacing! PHEW... I cannot rave enough about the amount of work he has put into this...This is not a lazy approach to book writing! It's methodical, complete, well illustrated and there are samples included and they all work as described in the book! If you are new to FPGA, this book may be the top stepping stone you're after! It should be on everybody's book shelf who deals with FPGA logic design and I'm considering buying another one, just in case I loose the first one...Yes, it's that good! Brilliant work Prof. Chu, please keep em' going! It's people like yourself that make VHDL learning fun and exciting again!

Reconfigurable Computing: The Theory and Practice of FPGA-Based Computation (Systems on Silicon)
$83.95
Reconfigurable computing (RC), of one kind or another, has been around at least since Estrin's work in the 1960s. FGPAs created the real platform for it in the 1980s but, as one of the RC's founders noted, "10¡ß-100¡ß of performance ... has been at the cost of 10¡ß-100¡ß increase in difficulty in application development." Outside of a few niches in signal processing, this No Man's Land between circuit design and programming remained largely unexplored. That changed in the last few years, with the Stratix/Virtex generation of FPGAs. Quite abruptly, large numbers of researchers and developers found enough computing power to make the effort of RC worthwhile. As with any emerging technology, developments first appeared in academic journals and conference proceedings. There hasn't been a systematic introduction to RC's practice, potential, and problems.

This book is that introduction. The editors present 38 chapters, each written by established RC researchers and educators. They start with an introduction to the basics: what an FPGA is, what suits it to use as a computing platform, and how it compares to other commercial and research engines. The next covers some of the major tools used in FPGA programming. Unlike C, which linguistically captures the sequential nature of the von Neumann bottleneck, VHDL and Verilog inherently describe massive and fine-grained parallelism. These languages present challenges of their own, obviously, so other chapters describe experimental and commercial alternatives to at least parts of the RC programming problem.

Starting around page 300, the book gets into the real meat of RC. Where von Neumann models distribute an algorithm across time, RC distributes it across the space provided by the RC fabric. It even offers space-time tradeoffs of unprecedented kinds, as these authors show. The next section covers application development, including partitioning and topics that might startle some C programmers. Since RC can use data values of any width, from individual bits to thousands, the programmer not only can but must decide how many to use, subject to tradeoffs unique to RC. Then we see applications, the whole reason for computing of any kind. A few well-chosen case studies appear in sufficient detail that a practitioner could reproduce the work, or large parts of it. This section, I think, distinguishes this book from all others I've seen. It truly gives the reader some feel for the structure and development of RC applications.

This isn't the only RC book on the market, and certainly won't be the last. People already familiar with RC's arcana might pick a few fact from the text, or from the voluminous bibliographies. For someone already familiar with hardware or software (or, preferably, both) but new to RC, this offers the best introduction currently available. Despite some minor flaws in editing (including blunders with exponents in eq. 37.7), this has my highest recommendation.

-- wiredweird

FPGAs: World Class Designs
$49.95
All the design and development inspiration and direction a harware engineer needs in one blockbuster book! Clive "Max" Maxfield renowned author, columnist, and editor of PL DesignLine has selected the very best FPGA design material from the Newnes portfolio and has compiled it into this volume. The result is a book covering the gamut of FPGA design from design fundamentals to optimized layout techniques with a strong pragmatic emphasis. In addition to specific design techniques and practices, this book also discusses various approaches to solving FPGA design problems and how to successfully apply theory to actual design tasks. The material has been selected for its timelessness as well as for its relevance to contemporary FPGA design issues.

Contents
Chapter 1 Alternative FPGA Architectures
Chapter 2 Design Techniques, Rules, and Guidelines
Chapter 3 A VHDL Primer: The Essentials
Chapter 4 Modeling Memories
Chapter 5 Introduction to Synchronous State Machine Design and Analysis
Chapter 6 Embedded Processors
Chapter 7 Digital Signal Processing
Chapter 8 Basics of Embedded Audio Processing
Chapter 9 Basics of Embedded Video and Image Processing
Chapter 10 Programming Streaming FPGA Applications Using Block Diagrams In Simulink
Chapter 11 Ladder and functional block programming
Chapter 12 Timers

*Hand-picked content selected by Clive "Max" Maxfield, character, luminary, columnist, and author
*Proven best design practices for FPGA development, verification, and low-power
*Case histories and design examples get you off and running on your current project