10 Best VHDL Books To Read in [2024] UPDATED

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It is important to read books to learn anything and the same holds when it comes to learning VHDL and becoming an expert of digital design. If you want to learn both digital design and VHDL then these ten best VHDL books that we listed here will help you to achieve your Goal.

We have compiled this list of 10 Best VHDL Books by keeping in mind that they are suitable for beginners, intermediate learners as well as experts. Many professionals have already benefited from this compilation, hope you do too!

So let’s explore the best VHDL Books that you should read to learn and understand the VHSIC Hardware Description Language in a comprehensive way.

Best VHDL Books for Beginners & Experts

These are the following some of the best VHDL books available in the market to hone and learn your digital designing skills.

These books help you to be good at VHSIC Hardware Description Language. Let’s take an overview of these 10 Best VHDL Books one by one and find which books suit you more.

1. Circuit Design with VHDL (The MIT Press)

A completely updated and expanded comprehensive treatment of VHDL and its applications to the design and simulation of real, industry-standard circuits.

New features include all VHDL-2008 constructs, an extensive review of digital circuits (combinatorial, sequential, state machines, and FPGAs), RTL analysis, and an unequaled collection of VHDL examples and exercises. The book focuses on the use of VHDL rather than solely on the language, with an emphasis on design examples and laboratory exercises.

The text offers complete VHDL codes in examples as well as simulation results and comments. The significantly expanded examples and exercises include many not previously published, with multiple physical demonstrations meant to inspire and motivate students.

The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in VHDL and digital circuit design, and can be used as a professional reference for VHDL practitioners. It can also serve as a text for digital VLSI in-house or academic courses.

 

2. The Designer’s Guide to VHDL, 3rd Edition (Systems on Silicon)

The Designer’s Guide to VHDL is both a comprehensive manual for the language and an authoritative reference on its use in hardware design at all levels, from system level down to gate level. Using the IEEE standard for VHDL, the author presents the entire description language and builds a modeling methodology based on successful software engineering techniques.

Requiring only a minimal background in programming, this is an excellent tutorial for anyone in computer architecture, digital systems engineering, or CAD.

The book is organized so that it can either be read cover to cover for a comprehensive tutorial or be kept desk side as a reference to the language. Each chapter introduces a number of related concepts or language facilities and illustrates each one with examples. Scattered throughout the book are four case studies, which bring together preceding material in the form of extended worked examples. In addition, each chapter is followed by a set of rated exercises.

This VHDL book have following features:

  • Presents a structured guide to the modeling facilities offered by VHDL
  • Helps readers get up to speed quickly with new features of the new standard
  • Shows how VHDL functions to help design digital systems
  • Includes extensive case studies and source code used to develop testbenches and case study examples
  • Helps readers gain maximum facility with VHDL for design of digital systems

 

3. VHDL: A Starter’s Guide (2nd Edition)

This handy reference gives readers a thorough grounding in the basic concepts and language of VHDL, and encourages them to apply what they have learned using realistic examples. Concepts are followed by examples and tutorials.

Providing a step- by-step introduction to learning VHDL as an applied language to be used in the design and testing of digital logic networks.

Adds appendices to support material: Includes a tutorial for a popular VHDL simulator; a handy reference to common VHDL packages; and a detailed template for a VHDL model illustrating the relative ordering of program constructs.

Emphasizes development of readers’ intuition and structured thinking about VHDL models without spending excessive time on advanced language features. Provides simulation and laboratory exercises that enable readers to quickly come up to speed in building useful, non-trivial models of digital systems.

Provides tutorial descriptions and presentation of programming mechanics unique to CAD tools and environments. Includes examples, extensive use of timing diagrams, event lists and many tutorials for independent student study. Provides sample problems, many of which include worked solutions. Includes viewgraph masters and the VHDL source for all text examples.  A useful reference for computer professionals who need to brush up on their VHDL knowledge.

Command syntax and structure are emphasized, and writing is based on many examples of real-world logic circuits. Readers will learn to write VHDL code and simulate the behaviour of any logic network, from basic to complex. Includes chapter summaries and exercises. Assumes background in a high-level programming language but no prior knowledge of HDLs.

 

4. Digital Design with RTL Design, VHDL, and Verilog

An up-to-date guide to essential digital design fundamentals. The only major digital design book to emphasize RTL design, central to the million-gate IC era, while continuing to introduce topics fully bottom-up. Teaches modern top-down design methodology for combinational, sequential, and RTL design.

Offering a modern, updated approach to digital design, this much-needed book reviews basic design fundamentals before diving into specific details of design optimization.

You begin with an examination of the low-levels of design, noting a clear distinction between design and gate-level minimization. The author then progresses to the key uses of digital design today, and how it is used to build high-performance alternatives to software.

Progresses though low levels of design, making a clear distinction between design and gate-level minimization. Enables you to gain a clearer understanding of applying digital design to your life. With this book by your side, you’ll gain a better understanding of how to apply the material in the book to real-world scenarios.

 

5. Digital Design: With an Introduction to the Verilog HDL, VHDL and System Verilog

This book is a clear and accessible approach to teaching the basic tools, concepts, and applications of digital design.

The text presents the basic tools for the design of digital circuits and provides procedures suitable for a variety of digital applications. This Digital Design book supports a multimodal approach to learning, with a focus on digital design, regardless of language. Recognizing that three public-domain languages–Verilog, VHDL, and System Verilog–all play a role in design flows for today’s digital devices, the book offers parallel tracks of presentation of multiple languages, but allows concentration on a single, chosen language.

 

6. RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL

This book teaches readers how to systematically design efficient, portable, and scalable Register Transfer Level (RTL) digital circuits using the VHDL hardware description language and synthesis software.

Focusing on the module-level design, which is composed of functional units, routing circuit, and storage, the book illustrates the relationship between the VHDL constructs and the underlying hardware components, and shows how to develop codes that faithfully reflect the module-level design and can be synthesized into efficient gate-level implementation.

It also examines the synthesis task from the perspective of the overall development process. Readers learn good design practices and guidelines to ensure that an RTL design can accommodate future simulation, verification, and testing needs, and can be easily incorporated into a larger system or reused. Discussion is independent of technology and can be applied to both ASIC and FPGA devices.

With a balanced presentation of fundamentals and practical examples, this is an excellent textbook for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses in advanced digital logic. Engineers who need to make effective use of today’s synthesis software and FPGA devices should also refer to this book.

 

7. Effective Coding with VHDL: Principles and Best Practice (The MIT Press)

This book presents this unique set of skills, teaching VHDL designers of all experience levels how to apply the best design principles and coding practices from the software world to the world of hardware.

The concepts introduced here will help readers write code that is easier to understand and more likely to be correct, with improved readability, maintainability, and overall quality.

After a brief review of VHDL, the book presents fundamental design principles for writing code, discussing such topics as design, quality, architecture, modularity, abstraction, and hierarchy. Building on these concepts, the book then introduces and provides recommendations for each basic element of VHDL code, including statements, design units, types, data objects, and subprograms.

The book covers naming data objects and functions, commenting the source code, and visually presenting the code on the screen. All recommendations are supported by detailed rationales. Finally, the book explores two uses of VHDL: synthesis and test benches. It examines the key characteristics of code intended for synthesis (distinguishing it from code meant for simulation) and then demonstrates the design and implementation of test benches with a series of examples that verify different kinds of models, including combinational, sequential, and FSM code.

Examples from the book are also available on a companion website, enabling the reader to experiment with the complete source code.

This VHDL guide help you to applying software design principles and coding practices to VHDL to improve the readability, maintainability, and quality of VHDL code.

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8. FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx MicroBlaze MCS SoC

This book follows the “learning-by-doing” approach to teach the fundamentals and practices of VHDL synthesis and FPGA prototyping. It uses a coherent series of examples to demonstrate the process to develop sophisticated digital circuits and IP (intellectual property) cores, integrate them into an SoC (system on a chip) framework, realize the system on an FPGA prototyping board, and verify the hardware and software operation.

The examples start with simple gate-level circuits, progress gradually through the RT level modules, and lead to a functional embedded system with custom I/O peripherals and hardware accelerators. Although it is an introductory text, the examples are developed in a rigorous manner, and the derivations follow strict design guidelines and coding practices used for large, complex digital systems.

The book presents the hardware design in the SoC context and introduces the hardware-software co-design concept. Instead of treating examples as isolated entities, the book integrates them into a single coherent SoC platform that allows readers to explore both hardware and software “programmability” and develop complex and interesting embedded system projects.

Best for introductory and advanced digital design courses and embedded system course. It also serves as an ideal self-teaching guide for practicing engineers who wish to learn more about this emerging area of interest.

 

9. PLD Based Design with VHDL: RTL Design, Synthesis and Implementation

This book covers basic fundamentals of logic design and advanced RTL design concepts using VHDL. The book is organized to describe both simple and complex RTL design scenarios using VHDL.

It gives practical information on the issues in ASIC prototyping using FPGAs, design challenges and how to overcome practical issues and concerns. It describes how to write an efficient RTL code using VHDL and how to improve the design performance.

The design guidelines by using VHDL are also explained with the practical examples in this book. The book also covers the ALTERA and XILINX FPGA architecture and the design flow for the PLDs.

The contents of this book will be useful to students, researchers, and professionals working in hardware design and optimization. The book can also be used as a text for graduate and professional development courses.

 

10. Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design with CD-ROM

Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design teaches the basic design techniques for logic circuits. The text provides a clear and easily understandable discussion of logic circuit design without the use of unnecessary formalism. It emphasizes the synthesis of circuits and explains how circuits are implemented in real chips.

Fundamental concepts are illustrated by using small examples, which are easy to understand. Then, a modular approach is used to show how larger circuits are designed.

VHDL is a complex language so it is introduced gradually in the book. Each VHDL feature is presented as it becomes pertinent for the circuits being discussed. While it includes a discussion of VHDL, the book provides thorough coverage of the fundamental concepts of logic circuit design, independent of the use of VHDL and CAD tools.

A CD-ROM contains all of the VHDL design examples used in the book, as well Altera’s Quartus II CAD software, is included free with every text.

1 thought on “10 Best VHDL Books To Read in [2024] UPDATED”

  1. Albert van Bemmelen

    Perry’s book Programming by example with CD-ROM now is total crap! I bought it and so I know that the program licenses are out of date and none of the software programs on the disc still work and the book therefore lost all todays use!
    I would also advise anyone interested in VHDL to also include this book: Frank Vahid’s Digital Design with Rtl Design, Vhdl, and Verilog! It not only introduces one in both languages but also teaches to design using (FSM) Finite State Machine diagrams. But also this book: Vaibbhav Taraate’s PLD Based Design with VHDL. The above presented list is also very outdated not even mentioning these 2 very good books!

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