Digital Design
While most popular digital design books present a perspective rooted in the 1970s and 1980s, Digital System Design takes the subject into the 21st century. It quickly moves through the low-levels of design, making a clear distinction between design and gate-level minimization. The book also emphasizes how one of the key uses of digital design today is to build high-performance alternatives to software in addition to glue logic. And it swiftly progresses to register-transfer-level (RTL) design since that is the level at which most digital design in practice today is performed.
Why Read This Book
You should read this book if you want a compact, practical introduction to modern RTL digital design using Verilog, with an emphasis on building hardware alternatives to software. It moves quickly from fundamentals to synthesizable Verilog, FSMs, datapath/control partitioning, and design-for-implementation topics that are directly useful for FPGA and ASIC workflows.
Who Will Benefit
Undergraduate students and practicing engineers who know basic digital logic and want to learn RTL design and synthesizable Verilog to implement hardware (especially on FPGAs).
Level: Intermediate — Prerequisites: Basic digital logic (gates, boolean algebra), binary arithmetic, and some programming familiarity; no prior Verilog required but helpful.
Key Takeaways
- Write and simulate synthesizable Verilog for combinational and sequential circuits.
- Translate functional specifications into datapath-plus-control RTL implementations.
- Design and optimize finite state machines and register-transfer structures.
- Apply synthesis-aware coding practices and understand mapping to FPGA resources.
- Evaluate hardware/software tradeoffs to decide when to implement functionality in hardware versus software.
Topics Covered
- 1. Introduction: Design in the 21st Century
- 2. Number Systems, Codes, and Arithmetic
- 3. Combinational Logic and Simple Minimization
- 4. Design Abstraction Levels and RTL Concepts
- 5. Verilog: Basics and Modeling Styles
- 6. Sequential Elements and Registers
- 7. Finite State Machines and Control Design
- 8. Datapath Design and ALU Construction
- 9. Memories, Register Files, and Interconnect
- 10. Synthesis, Timing, and Implementation Issues
- 11. Testbenches, Verification, and Debugging
- 12. Hardware/Software Tradeoffs and Case Studies
- Appendices: Reference Material and Verilog Language Summary
Languages, Platforms & Tools
How It Compares
Covers similar ground to Harris & Harris's Digital Design and Computer Architecture but is more Verilog- and RTL-focused with an embedded-systems slant; Pong P. Chu's FPGA prototyping books are more hands-on for tool flows and board-level examples.
