Harnessing VLSI System Design with EDA Tools

With the proliferation of VHDL, the reference material also grew in the same order. Today there is good amount of scholarly literature including many books describing various aspects of VHDL. However, an indepth review of these books reveals a different story. Many of them have emerged simply as an improved version of the manual. While some of them deal with the system design issues, they lack appropriate exemplifying to illustrate the concepts. Others give large number of examples, but lack the VLSI system design issues.

In nutshell, the fact which gone unnoticed by most of the books, is the growth of the VLSI is not merely due to the language itself, but more due to the development of large number of third party tools useful from the FPGA or semicustom ASIC realization point of view. In the proposed book, the authors have synergized the VHDL programming with appropriate EDA tools so as to present a full proof system design to the readers. In this book along with the VHDL coding issues, the simulation and synthesis with the various toolsets enables the potential reader to visualize the final design. The VHDL design codes have been synthesized using different third party tools such as Xilinx Web pack Ver.11, Modelsim PE, Leonrado Spectrum and Synplify Pro. Mixed flow illustrated by using the above mentioned tools presents an insight to optimize the design with reference to the spatial, temporal and power metrics.

This book explores various dimensions of EDA technologies for achieving different goals in VLSI system design.  Although the scope of EDA is very broad and comprises diversified hardware and software tools to accomplish different phases of VLSI system design, such as design, layout, simulation, testability, prototyping and implementation, this book focuses only on demystifying the code, a.k.a. firmware development and its implementation with FPGAs.  Since there are a variety of languages for system design, this book covers various issues related to VHDL, Verilog and System C synergized with EDA tools, using a variety of case studies such as testability, verification and power consumption.

• Covers aspects of VHDL, Verilog and Handel C in one text;
• Enables designers to judge the appropriateness of each EDA tool for relevant applications;
• Omits discussion of design platforms and focuses on design case studies;
• Uses design case studies from diversified application domains such as network on chip, hospital on chip, analog to digital conversion and embedded system design;
• Facilitates with code and tool flows the design cycle for systems on chip with increasing complexity;
• Demonstrates standard development cycles, making use of latest concepts such as ‘Soft IP Cores’, ‘Hardware Software Codesign’ etc.