Ahem. Excuse me but hardware does still stink. My snail mail box has at least 4 or 5 settlement letters from law firms or recall notices from companies about hard drives, zip drives, ibook main boards, etc.
Ever use an HP1100A printer? Peee-uuuuw! It looks great. I'm sure it won design awards. However, HP has had to settle a class action because many of the printers (including the one I own) have a bad habit of jamming (and we ain't talking about Bob Marley either).
Seems to me that some of the hardware developers have picked up some of the bad habits of some of the software developers. The recent rediscovery of TQM is testiment to this fact.
Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things says that every 20 years or so companies forget their own quality process/methodologies and have to remember/recreate/reinvent them. I say Amen!
That why I find all the present hub-bub over 6-Sigma and TQM etc. so hilarious...we did all that crap at bell labs back in the 1980s! New management decided in the 1990s that quality techniques were "corny" and "too slow" and a new swath of suckers, er-I mean...engineers, came in. Now it's back to the future because these new "teams" built all this crap that didn't work well for customers.
Why do managers refuse to understand the difference between a prototype and a product?! Why are they willing to settle for blame as the default quality process?
VHDL for Programmable Logic by Kevin Skahill is an oldie but goodie (ISBN 0201895730).
Peter Ashenden's The Designer's Guild to VHDL 2nd Edition (ISBN 1558606742) is also good...
Smiths... HDL Chip Design (ISBN 0965193438)is a good VHDL/Verilog language reference but many of the examples are not synthesizable...
use your IEEE discount! I think all of the books are available through http://shop.ieee.org
I used Donald Alcock's Illustrating C (ANSI/IOS Verson) (Cambridge University Press: NY, 1992, ISBN 0-521-46821-3) on an 80C186 embedded project years ago and found it to be indispensible! The book has the just right amount of detail. I'd also like to see books like Illustrating C++ and (even better) Illustrating VHDL/Verilog (Skahill's classic VHDL for Programmable Logic comes close but it's outdated and full of errors.)
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Ahem. Excuse me but hardware does still stink. My snail mail box has at least 4 or 5 settlement letters from law firms or recall notices from companies about hard drives, zip drives, ibook main boards, etc.
Ever use an HP1100A printer? Peee-uuuuw! It looks great. I'm sure it won design awards. However, HP has had to settle a class action because many of the printers (including the one I own) have a bad habit of jamming (and we ain't talking about Bob Marley either).
Seems to me that some of the hardware developers have picked up some of the bad habits of some of the software developers. The recent rediscovery of TQM is testiment to this fact.
Build it and they will run away screaming...Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things says that every 20 years or so companies forget their own quality process/methodologies and have to remember/recreate/reinvent them. I say Amen!
That why I find all the present hub-bub over 6-Sigma and TQM etc. so hilarious...we did all that crap at bell labs back in the 1980s! New management decided in the 1990s that quality techniques were "corny" and "too slow" and a new swath of suckers, er-I mean...engineers, came in. Now it's back to the future because these new "teams" built all this crap that didn't work well for customers.
Why do managers refuse to understand the difference between a prototype and a product?! Why are they willing to settle for blame as the default quality process?
VHDL for Programmable Logic by Kevin Skahill is an oldie but goodie (ISBN 0201895730).
Peter Ashenden's The Designer's Guild to VHDL 2nd Edition (ISBN 1558606742) is also good...
Smiths... HDL Chip Design (ISBN 0965193438)is a good VHDL/Verilog language reference but many of the examples are not synthesizable...
use your IEEE discount! I think all of the books are available through http://shop.ieee.org
I used Donald Alcock's Illustrating C (ANSI/IOS Verson) (Cambridge University Press: NY, 1992, ISBN 0-521-46821-3) on an 80C186 embedded project years ago and found it to be indispensible! The book has the just right amount of detail. I'd also like to see books like Illustrating C++ and (even better) Illustrating VHDL/Verilog (Skahill's classic VHDL for Programmable Logic comes close but it's outdated and full of errors.)