Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems: SOPC Edition

After 30 years in the ASIC design business and two layoffs, I decided to sharpen my skills by designing with FPGAs. I got an Altera DE1 board and started coding. Then I found this book. I realized that I could do projects ranging from simple digital designs to complex and complete microprocessor based systems. The book lays out coding examples and design flow instructions that enable readers to go beyond a cookbook redo of the sample projects. I am planning to use this book to train engineers that want to learn how to design with FPGAs.

Can’t find an alternative book like this one

Out of date by a lot.

Not very memorable, but it got the job done.

Excellent review of material for both beginners and more advanced digital designers. Plenty of examples, tutorials, and code snippets in both VHDL and Verilog. Easy to apply to boards other than Altera DE2.

I bought this as shown in an online course, didn't browse the existing reviews. I just received today and I'm in chapter 1, which is a tutorial walkthrough of something very simple, just an OR gate and 3 pins (the FPGA version of a 'hello world' project), create, compile, simulate, load on the board, the basic flow + prove your setup is working.It seems to me so far that this book is basically decent, except that it's quickly becoming apparent that it's out of date, which is what other reviewers report. Copyright on mine says 2008.The steps described don't always match the current version of Altera Quartus II, for example there is no 'vector waveform file' tool anymore; some google fishing indicates that apparently one is now expected to use the ModelSim program, outside of the main Quartus II app. There were I think two other spots previously (to page 17) where the book example didn't match the reality, but in those cases I soon worked out what to do.I'm now on pages 38 (timing analysis) and 39 (floorplan editor), and also can't open the tools described there in Quartus II web edition 10.0. I think I'll need to go through the current documentation for the tool, with the understanding that the functions described in the book are doable, somehow, somewhere in the current software.

This book was one of the best books I have ever read in VHDl and Verilog areas. Thank you, very satisfied.

This will get you working with the Arrow/Altera SOCFpga boards. You may be able to adapt what you find to other fpga families with built-in processor systems.

The "Rapid prototyping of digital systems SOPC edition" text, was a great companion for my VHDL programming course. This book has several FPGA/VHDL based projects to choose from. Our course focused on VHDL programming and interfacing an FPGA development board to a VGA monitor to display graphics. This book lays out the fundamentals on how a VGA interface works and also discusses the signal timing requirements for displaying an image on the VGA screen.VHDL programming examples are provided to show how a simple VGA controller is implemented using an FPGA. Included in these examples is a block of VHDL code that shows how to display graphics of a ball bouncing up and down on the VGA monitor. This is the fundamental code that is used in College or University courses to have students create a PONG VIDEO GAME using an FPGA development board and the VHDL hardware programming language.This book was a great asset!!