petera@chook.adelaide.edu.au (Peter Ashenden) (01/15/91)
Last year I used VHDL as the modeling language for a student project in an undergraduate computer architecture course. The students had to choose a microprocessor chip and write and test a model of it. I had read the books referred to in previous articles in this newsgroup, but didn't find them suitable for students in that course. Hence I put together a booklet for them to learn VHDL from. It assumes that the reader basically knows how to program (as most final year CS students do :-) ), and so gives a fairly quick but thorough run through the sequential aspects of the language. The hardware modeling, concurrency and discrete event simulation algorithms are covered in a bit more detail. About 40% of the booklet is an extended example, modeling a pretend RISC processor at both abstract and RTL levels. The booklet doesn't cover all of VHDL, but does cover all the features I found useful for architecture level modeling (about 95%). If I get the time, I plan to revise it this year for a repeat of the course. If there is sufficient interest, I can make copies available for personal or teaching use. Reference: Peter J. Ashenden The VHDL Cookbook (First Edition, July 1990) Dept Computer Science, University of Adelaide, South Australia approx 120 pp. Peter A.
petera@chook.adelaide.edu.au (Peter Ashenden) (01/16/91)
The VHDL Cookbook is now available for anonymous ftp from chook.adelaide.edu.au in directory pub/VHDL-Cookbook. Please read the README file for info on use and how to extract it. It's a binhex'ed self-extracting compactor archive containing Microsoft Word for Mac documents. Comments and suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Peter A.
petera@chook.adelaide.edu.au (Peter Ashenden) (01/17/91)
Oops. Apologies to those of you who ftp'ed the VHDL Cookbook and couldn't extract it. I put the wrong archive up. The problem is fixed now. ftp to chook.adelaide.edu.au, and get pub/VHDL-Cookbook/VHDL-Cookbook.cpt.Hqx. The README in the same directory contains instructions for extracting, as well as copyright and distribution notices. Peter A