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Ask Slashdot: Sources For Firmware and Hardware Books?
First time accepted submitter cos(0) writes "Between O'Reilly, Wrox, Addison-Wesley, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, and many others, software developers have a wide variety of literature about languages, patterns, practices, and tools. Many publishers even offer subscriptions to online reading of the whole collection, exposing you to things you didn't even know you don't know — and many of us learn more from these publishers than from a Comp Sci curriculum. But what about publishers and books specializing in tech underneath software — like VHDL, Verilog, design tools, and wire protocols? In particular, best practices, modeling techniques, and other skills that separate a novice from an expert?"
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I am an embedded software engineer who does some hardware/electrical engineering too. Unfortunately there is very little material on this subject specifically. Basically you need to learn how to code in C (not C++ or C#, raw C), learn some electronics and then maybe learn VHDL/Verilog as well. You then put it all together in your own mind.
It is really hard to recruit people with those skills so they are worth having. You will need some hands on experience though. You can simulate wire protocols and some hardware but none of the simulations are particularly good practice for real life, and employers will want examples of work anyway. A university level course would be best.
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Some of the publishers above have hardware-focused titles as well. Also take a look at www.springer.com.
It's not a book, but this book chapter is more-or-less compulsory reading for someone planning to get into HDL programming:
A structured VHDL design method
Pirate Party UK
and many of us learn more from these publishers than from a Comp Sci curriculum
Not me, man. And, don't get me wrong, I love pragprog and I worship O'Reilly and NoStarch. Hell, I review books for them on Slashdot! But no book would have been able to teach me about automata theory or linear algebra and differential equations like my college courses did. I'm sorry but I must argue that there's a lot of application and implementation to be gleaned from these books -- not so much on the theory and foundational concepts. At least for me there's something really difficult about reading a book about really "far out there" concepts and truly understanding them without human intervention. Maybe I'm just stupid but I find the best tech books show me "little jumps" while my college courses were the only way I could make "the big jumps" in knowledge quickly enough.
Plus, going to a liberal arts college meant general requirements that furthered me along in ethics, philosophy, etc more than these books did. I wouldn't go selling a college education short even though it seems to be the popular thing to bash these days.
My work here is dung.
Quite often the best references are datasheets for microcontrollers. This is where I have gained the bulk of my knowledge.
I would also look at what the Association for Computing Machinery has. I had a memebership a while back and it seems they had so resources on this topic. In fact looking back they have a book called VHDL for Programmable Logic, which I have no idea if it what you are looking for, but there you go.
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I read the free ebook titled Free Range VHDL out of pure interest. Found it will written, but as I'm no engineer I cannot tell if it's exactly what the poster is asking for. But might be worth a read. http://www.freerangefactory.org/
I don't know why a software guy wants to learn VHDL, but here's where I started: VHDL For Designers http://www.amazon.com/VHDL-For-Designers-Stefan-Sjoholm/dp/0134734149
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The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is a must read for anyone looking to get started in the EE/CE field.
A Computer Engineering curriculum is much better than a traditional CS degree for this type of work, so you might look at what texts are being used in high quality CE programs. The Embedded Systems Conferences from UBM are also a good source of training for low level firmware implementation.
Look for books by Joseph Cavanagh or Michael Ciletti
- Grab a couple books on C/C++ and Verilog. I highly recommend "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design", great for both learning and for reference. For C/C++, I've always been a fan of the Sam's "Learn __ in 24 hours" books.
- Get yourself a FPGA development card, so you can get some "hardware play" in and familiarize yourself with some development tools. I have an Altera DE1 educational card that's a few years old, but it's got endless blocks on it (displays, LEDs, buttons, flash, SDRAM, VGA, sound... you name it) which makes it a great little card for embedded system learning. There's a whole set of Verilog and Nios (embedded processor) tutorials available for it, and lots of online hackers who have ported x86 processors (Zet project), hardware emulations of the NES, etc... to it. Xilinx and Actel also make some nice evaluation boards that seem to be targeted fairly often by hobbyists.
Other than that... you can study the heck out of wire protocols, but you'll probably forget everything you learn unless you end up implementing it. You're better off trying to learn as many general things as you can - how to create well organized C/C++ and Verilog code, making your designs meet timing and such - so that if you end up having to implement something, you've got the basics already in place and don't need too much incremental learning. Also if you have some fun ideas for FPGA projects, implement your heart out - that sort of stuff looks great on a resume.
Good luck!
There isn't any. It's VMs all the way down now. Hardware is so 20th century.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I recently taught myself VHDL and used Pong P. Chu's book. I liked it quite a bit. It did an especially good job of reinforcing the mindset of approaching VHDL programming as digital circuit design, not software design.
Just like software project, you'll need to actually dive in to learn anything outside of quoting books. Experience is what separate the junior engineers from the fresh out of school.
You can get "free" CPLD/FPGA vendor tools from the big 3 chips suppliers - Xilinx, Altera and Lattice. There are restriction on the design tool - either size/the chips selection, but other than that they are more than generous for some large non-trivial real life designs. The environment also have simulations again with some limitations on speed and/or size which would not be an issue. The same vendors and 3rd parties also have evaluation boards should you decided to go the next step of downloading the design onto the target chip.
As for wired protocol, it is up to you to find the sources from the official standards themselves. Most of them (except USB/Ethernet and some open standards) require some payments. Everything else (i.e books, pre-standards floating on the web) are okay for understand, but should not be the basis for claiming standard compliance without reading up on the real standards and/or 3rd party testing lab.
"skills that separate a novice from an expert" is hands on experience... It is not something you can get in a book or utube.
Both VHDL and Verilog provide you with 1001 ways of designing crappy circuits which don't work. This book tells you precisely which language constructs to use to get good synthesis results which will work equally well with FPGA and ASIC. For most experienced designers this is considered 'obvious' stuff, but if you're new to HDL design, this is a must read on the way to becoming an expert.
Oh wait, those f-ing bastards from the "book cartel" got them shut down.
Never mind, good luck finding anything of value.
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If you're coming from a software background, you might want to start by learning Ada. VHDL is very similar to Ada, with the major addition of statements that truly execute simultaneously in parallel.
Check out http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
alt.binaries.e-book.technical
Being a hardware engineer my self some books I have been reading from time to time are
VHDL:
Pong P.Chu - RTL Hardware design using VHDL (2007)
Volnei A. Pedroni - Circuit Design with VHDL (2004)
One of the following is really good for VHDL but I don't remember which of the two I keep confusing them...
VHDL Handbook by HARDI electronics (1997)
Peter J. Ashenden - VHDL Cookbook (1990)
U. Meyer-Baese - Digital Signal Processing With FPGA (2007)
Laung-Terng Wang, Cheng-Wen Wu, Xiaoqing Wen - VLSI Test principles and architectures (2006)
Jean Pierre Deschamps, Gery Jean Antoine Bioul, Gustavo D.Sutter - Synthesis of arithmetic Circuits (2006)
Michael Keating, Pierre Bricaud - Reuse Methodology manual for System-On-Chip designs (2002) - Must have for HW design
There are also books like Patterson's Computer Architecture which are really fundamental.
For the state of the art you can search for papers in IEEE explore and ACM portal as well as Springer books there are some gems there!
Hope that helps.
I'm really enjoying the testbook for the VHDL/FPGA RTL design class I'm taking now. RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL: Coding for Efficiency, Portability, and Scalability by Pong Chu. It doesn't bog down talking about all possibilities the language allows for legal syntax. The author really seems to focus on common practice for coding into a chip. There's very little if any testbench/simulation in this book, so look elsewhere for that, this one is all about the circuit design. Rather than only explaining what an FSM is, or just that you need a combination of registers and combinational logic, it gives some good suggestion on how to organize your code, such as using two or three separate processes rather than a single one. It talks about coding styles to minimize logic stages for some types of circuits. And it's the first one to explain why getting latches in synthesis is "bad" in a way I could understand, where other books just seem to say "don't allow latches" and I didn't understand why. I find this very refreshing now, as my first exposure to VHDL back in the mod 1990's had a terrible textbook that left me horribly confused about how to do anything useful with the language. And that was very frustrating as I was very interested in FPGAs, and there was no Verilog course at my university. After working with Verilog for the past few years at work, Chu's VHDL textbook has made it a lot easier for me to see how to create Verilog as well, rather than just read to understand other people's code. Chu has some other books that come in VHDL and Verilog pairs. They have project examples to play with in an inexpensive FPGA board. Check them out too.
For firmware and coding hardware, look for books on Embedded style programming, and about driver development. Look up some programmer guides for some ARM chips, they will tell you register definitions and fields and such to program to. I don't know how good these will be, but on my todo list are "Essential Linux Device Driver", "Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition", and "Hardware/Firmware Interface Design: Best Practices for Improving Embedded Systems Development". I looked at "Atmel AVR Microcontroller Primer: Programming and Interfacing (Synthesis Lectures on Digital Circuits and Systems) " which may be a good example of some of this as well, and check out some Arduino project books, that seems likely to talk about some of this stuff as well. A reviewer of one of the many AVR books says to go look up the http://www.avrfreaks.net/ website for some free such info. They and similar sites for Pic and Arm should have some relevant information for you. If these all seem too much of the "this is the language" or "this is what the hardware looks like" but not enough of "common practice is to..." type, maybe get a kickstarter project going to make what you need, and start interviewing people that do this every day.
VHDL and Verilog create gates and flip-flops, not code. Learning the languages isn't all that difficult. Learning the particulars about the FPGA's your "software" is going to go into is not trivial and requires hardware design knowledge.
Your FPGA isn't running on a virtual machine somewhere on the cloud. You need to know how to use a multimeter to make a FPGA go.
When's the last time you had a C++ file that defined your pin locations?
This is where I started about a year ago:
http://www.fpga4fun.com/
Got a Xilinx dev kit, and it didn't take me too many weeks to get my project up to a stage where other people started using it.
Besides programming, a background in general electronics does help. Even if you're coding in a somewhat C-like language, it's nothing like a sequential program, but a description of hardware with real, physical parallelity. To me, it often helps to look at a circuit diagram to understand some debugging issues.
Data sheets from chip manufacturers are essential for some of the trickier points. If you need to choose between the two largest players, I recommend Altera over Xilinx, as they are somewhat more open, but mostly there are no huge differences.
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This kind of Hardware stuff is what I do most of the time. First, yes do get a dev board and free tools (Xilinx or Altera) to play with (just like you would play with software by compiling and trying).
Second, pick a language, I use mostly VHDL.
I like:
"VHDL for Logic Synthesis" Rushton
"VHDL Coding Styles and Methodologies" Cohen
Also google "VHDL Math tricks of the trade" (pdf) you'll need that to stay sane if you actually do algorithms
How much space does that take exactly? Or were you talking about using a _subset_ of C++?
Anyone dealing with device drivers, early bringup code, or exception handlers needs to be able to read datasheets. Generally not so much VHDL though.
Nobody has mentioned Jack Ganssle or Embedded Systems Magazine? Visit http://www.ganssle.com/, subscribe to The Embedded Muse, and if possible go to one of his Seminars.
I'm lucky, I started as an electronic tech in the late 70's. I learned to write software to wiggle wires for troubleshooting, engineering found out about it and drafted me. Went to school for my degree (math), and haven't had much trouble working since.
"Embedded Systems Firmware Demystified" by Ed Sutter (the one with the computerized toaster on the cover) is a pretty good book to start out reading, and of course doing the examples:) The book is from 2002, but there is still a lot of good stuff in there. IIRC it was copyright Lucent Technologies, and comes with the GNU compiler and many examples from Linux.
An oscilloscope or logic analyzer, and a few months working through the examples in the book with some real hardware will really help!
Cheers!
Check out 'Advanced FPGA Design' ( ISBN-10: 0470054379 ).
Pretty good fundamental overview about tradeoffs when designing for area/frequency/power etc.
Has some stuff about clock domain crossing too.
-Learn basic Verilog ( asic-world.com is good )
-Start getting a feel for how your logic will be synthesized into primitives like LUT, Block Ram, etc.
-Get into parametric defines, generate statements, more advanced Verilog language features (makes your code more valuable, adaptable, reusable, etc)
-Pick up a copy of ModelSim and learn SystemVerilog (SV), DPI (makes your simulation/verification more productive)
-Understand common test environments used in OVM/UVM (i.e. driver, monitor, scoreboard, etc.) (makes your simulation/verificaiton more productive)
Debug efficiently, build assertions or triggers for logic analyzers to catch errors, rather than pouring over your RTL.
Be very methodical. Be very diligent. Be very patient.
Take a class or work with some friends on some projects.
Even if the first module is flashing an LED, you can start building some momentum and move to larger designs.
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First, I'd suggest deciding what you want to focus on -- firmware (embedded programming) or HDL. If you're coming from a CS background, you might want to start with digital systems and computer architecture before plunging into HDL. Designing a CPU at the gate level will teach you more about how the hardware works than writing a page or two of behavioral HDL. These basics are also good for embedded programming. Without knowing more about your background, it's hard to know what to suggest. If you're coming from PC application programming (or, god forbid, web scripting) with no electronics or low-level background, get ready for a shock -- you're not in Kansas anymore. Personally, I'd suggest starting with some basic 8-bit AVR or PIC projects, since there's a lot of material on the net to help you. I've mostly learned on the job, so rather than giving you books, I'll suggest some topics to study:
Software .text so you can parse the error messages when your program gets too big for the chip it's in. Read this article for some hints in a PC app context.
1. C programming in general and pointers in particular. Use this as a bridge to assembly.
2. Enough assembly to understand what sort of operations there are and how they're used. Don't bother writing huge programs in assembly; just make you sure you can read your debugger's output. This is a good chance to figure out whether your CPU has a hardware multiplier (probably) and divider (probably not). This tells you which operations are fast and which are dog-slow.
3. Where all the pieces of your program go in memory (code and constants in flash, data in RAM). Learn about standard assembly sections like
4. Bit twiddling. AND, OR, XOR, inversion, shifting. Basically, any C operator listed under the "bitwise" section.
Hardware (theory)
1. Registers. CPU registers. Memory-mapped IO registers. Read-only vs. writable registers. Reset states of registers. You're going to be dealing with a lot of registers.
2. General-purpose IO pins and all their features. Look at a schematic in a microcontroller datasheet and understand input/high-impedance vs. output vs. input with an internal pull-up/down. Maybe driver current strength if you want to make *big* blinking lights.
3. Clocking. Where the clock comes from (crystal? internal oscillator?), how precise it is, how it's divided down, and how to turn off the division so the chip will run at full speed.
4. How to read a datasheet. Figure out what voltage(s) you need to power the chip and what (if anything) should be connected to each pin on power-up. Datasheets are very long. Learn to skim.
5. How to limit the current on LEDs with resistors so they don't blow up.
6. How to use a linear voltage regulator to get a clean 5V out of whatever DC power source you can Frankenstein together.
7. At least a cursory knowledge of voltage, current, and Ohm's law. Know how to determine power dissipation in a resistor (compute it) or an LED (read it out of the datasheet).
Hardware (bench-top)
1. How to use a multimeter. Spring for a nice auto-ranging one on eBay.
2. How to wire up a breadboard. Don't bother soldering yet; this is much easier. Hint: keep your wires short and neatly-arranged. Get a wire stripper and learn how to use it.
3. (Optional) If you have some money to throw around, pick up a bench-top power supply off of eBay. A triple-output supply is the most you'll ever need, but single-output is fine for simple MCU projects. This is more convenient and reliable than cutting up a wall wart.
4. (Even more optional) If you have a lot of money and are pretty serious, get a digital storage oscilloscope (NOT an analog-only scope, unless it's really cheap). This will do wonders for your debugging. Buy used unless you're rich or hard-core. Bench-top electronic tools are not cheap.
5. Find a local electronics store. Fry's is a decent choice (for tools, too!), and many cities have smaller but cheaper
Visit the
ironically, the experts are the ones who take a high level approach. The novices are either the ones taking a high level approach that won't work, or the ones taking an incredibly low level approach.
VHDL seems to be thrown about slashdot a lot. Of course the 1990s saw heated debate about how VHDL is better than Verilog, but if you look at the ground reality, hardly anybody is doing new VHDL design. Even Europe, the last bastion of VHDL is moving to Verilog.
So if you want to upgrade your skills, and are new to the field, try Verilog and System Verilog.
Though SV started as a "simulation and tbench" language", its being increasingly used in design.
System verilog for design (google it) is a popular book.
PS: I am working in EDA and VLSI field for past 11 years, and have seen multiple designs from many large Semiconductor companies.
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There are lot's of books on HDLs, but to get good results for non-trivial designs you also need to learn how to test them.
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Testbenches-Functional-Verification-Edition/dp/1402074018 is a great guide to this.
pong chu books are REALLY good. (Hardware design, VHDL/Verilog and SoC)