VHDL book recommendations - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Chris_R
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2010, 04:53:00 am
content: Yes I know there's absolutely loads of these questions if I just search google but it seems none of them really help me that much.I would like to start learning VHDL (having had some experience with verilog) but unsurprisingly I don't have enough money to buy a dev board right now. I want to know if anyone knows of any books that teach VHDL but give examples and exercises that can be completed using a testbench (at least for the first part of the book) and teach how to use testbenches well.It seems that most books that get recommended around the net either focus highly on one specific development board, or are highly focused on the actual syntax of the language with little "hands on" stuff.The only book I have found so far that sort of fits this description for me is "Digital System Design with VHDL" by Mark Zwolinski but I want to know if there are any others

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2010, 08:21:05 am
content: I like "VHDL for programmable logic" by Kevin Skahill - very practical book on The bits of VHDL specific to FPGAs, not brand-specific.

author: armandas
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2010, 09:55:53 am
content: FPGA prototyping by VHDL examplesby Pong P. Chu. The book uses an example-based teaching and there is a testbench for pretty much every example as well.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 14, 2011, 10:34:58 pm
content: Quotei read this suggestion several times here. got a copy, but its for xilinx spartan 3...1) can i implement the idea/code in the book for quartus 10.1 for altera cyclone fpga?2) any other books suggestion for altera cyclone fpga?vhdl or verilog? i've no idea, so suggestion for both will be appreciated

author: joelby
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 14, 2011, 10:50:27 pm
content: Remember that VHDL itself is independent of the FPGA vendor (though different vendors support different versions of VHDL). Almost of Chu's book will apply to Altera parts, though you would need to find a separate tutorial for getting acquainted with the Altera software. A few of the chapters and sections in my Verilog version of the book have "Xilinx specific" marked.From memory, Chu mostly uses inference and no vendor-specific instantiations, so you'll just need to make sure your development board has the same sort of peripherals, and that you generate the appropriate pin mapping constraints yourself.

author: olsenn
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 14, 2011, 11:29:42 pm
content: Check out the book "Digital Design" VHDL edition from Digilent (www.digilentinc.com). It's one of the best. A large portion of the "Intro to Digital Design" book is also available for free.

author: Tris20
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2013, 03:27:42 pm
content: Going to give this a bump. I recently bought the student's guide to vhdl. seems quite good at first glance. I'll post up in a few months once I've gone through it and let you know how useful it was. Anyone else got some recommendations?

author: andersm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2013, 05:07:07 pm
content: It's pretty much the opposite kind of book from what you want, butThe Designer's Guide to VHDLis excellent for learning the actual language. However, it does not teach digital design. The same author has writtena few other booksthat may be closer to what you're looking for.

author: MasterOfNone
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2013, 09:02:51 pm
content: Quote from: andersm on August 18, 2013, 05:07:07 pmQuote from: Tris20 on August 18, 2013, 03:27:42 pmI thought the students guide owned by Tris20 was the same as the Designers guide, just cut down.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2013, 11:25:49 pm
content: Quote from: andersm on August 18, 2013, 05:07:07 pmWhen starting with VHDL I wouldn't focus so much on digital design because you might miss out on all the goodies VHDL has to offer. Don't become another logic equations code monkey! Just for fun look for a priority encoder example in VHDL. 9 out of 10 examples use equations for each output (which can become a lot!) and only 1 uses a 3 line function which has an arbitrary input width.Xilinx (and probably Altera as well) has excellent documents on how to write synthesizable VHDL which you can read when you've reached the point to start using VHDL for programmable device. No need to buy a book for that.

author: JoeyP
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2013, 07:30:11 pm
content: I have several VHDL books on the shelf, each with its own strengths in different areas, but my overall favorite is "VHDL Made Easy!" by David Pellerin and Douglas Taylor. It starts out simple enough for a total beginner, but covers the language in depth, and has good practical examples for virtually everything I've ever needed to do in VHDL.

author: TerminalJack505
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2013, 09:43:55 pm
content: Some free VHDL-related books can be foundhere.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2013, 02:35:59 am
content: Not quite what you're asking for, but a friend of mine who's been using VHDL for a while and knows lots of others who do also, recommended I should look into something called MyHDL.Quoting the sitehttp://www.myhdl.org/doku.php------------MyHDL - From Python to Silicon!Welcome to the MyHDL website. MyHDL is an open source Python package that lets you go from Python to silicon. With MyHDL, you can use Python as a hardware description and verification language. Furthermore, you can convert MyHDL code, that was developed towards implementation, to Verilog and VHDL automatically, and take it to a silicon implementation from there.------------I've been too busy so far. But it's worth mentioning here.