In
the decade since the first edition of this book was published, the
technologies of digital design have continued to evolve. The evolution
has run along two closely related tracks: the underlying physical
technology and the software tools that facilitate the application of
the new devices. The trends identified in the first edition have
continued stronger than ever and promise to continue for some time to
come. Specifically, programmable logic has become virtually the norm
for digital designers and the art of digital design now absolutely
requires the software skills to deal with hardware description
languages.
No
longer do we see the familiar yellow cover of the TTL Data Book on
every designer’s bookshelf. In fact, for many application areas, even
small programmable logic devices (PLDs), the mainstays of the 1970s and
early 1980s, are rapidly disappearing. The burgeoning market for
smaller, lower power, and more portable devices has driven high levels
of integration into almost every product. This also has changed the
nature of optimization; the focus is now on what goes into each chip
rather than on the collection of individual gates needed to realize the
design. The optimizations of today are more and more often made at the
architecture level rather than in the switches.
Hardware designers now spend the majority of
their time dealing with software. Specifically, the tools needed to
efficiently map digital designs onto the emerging programmable devices
that are growing ever more sophisticated. They capture their design
specifications in software with description languages appropriate for
describing the parallelism of hardware; they use software tools to
simulate their designs and then to synthesize it into the
implementation technology of choice. Design time is reduced radically
as market pressures require products to be introduced quickly, at the
right price and performance.
Although the
evergrowing complexity of designs necessitates more powerful
abstractions, the fundamentals haven’t changed. In fact, the
contemporary digital designer must have a broader understanding
of the discipline of computation than ever before, including both
hardware and software. In this second edition, we provide this broader
perspective.
See the Prentice-Hall
site for the book.
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