Learning FPGAs: Digital Design for Beginners with Mojo and Lucid HDL

Very good book. Some things I find a bit confusing. Would have personally liked a different approach for learning Lucid; teach me simply how each type/module/lut works rather than showing me example after example.However, this book is in my mind a must have if you have any Alchitry product and would like to streamline vhdl. If you’re serious about learning vhdl there’s no way around the hard way. If you simply want to get to making with FPGA’s, this is definitely a very thoughtfully truncated approach working through Alchitry and Lucid.

I'd mentioned in another the review the fact that the XiLinx system doesn't support Windows 10 and neither does it's work around of supplying a 9 gigabyte virtual machine so if you're using MOJO this book will tell you how to do it but if you have Windows 10, you can't. :-(

Back in the mid-1970s, everyone and their brother – at least in the circles I ran in – was trying to build and even mass produce small computers. A few really big names emerged like Apple, IBM, TRS (Tandy Radio Shack), Commodore and several more. But there were a lot of smaller companies like Cromemco that produced specialty systems. If you wanted to build a computer or similar device from the ground up, the first thing you needed was a very deep pocket to fund the design and production of various chips. Today, you can literally roll your own chips in the form of FPGAs - field-programmable gate arrays. To a guy who used to scrimp pennies to buy what are now commodity parts that sold for a king’s ransom back then, this is simply mind-blowing. FGPAs are programmable logic devices. You design them with software, using a special board, to perform logic functions and then like Lego or MineCraft sub-assemblies link them together to perform more complex tasks. The beauty of this book is that you need only basic knowledge of electricity, programming and computer science to take a stab at designing and creating FPGAs. It is not something that will appeal to more people, but for those who have a yen for it, this book is great. The language is simple and clear and the author does a lot of hand-holding. I kind of doubt I’ll ever get to the stage of designing an FPGA, but author Justin Rajewski has convinced me to get closer by joining the Arudino camp. Fun book for the technically inclined – and tech dreamers.Jerry

This is a very well written book that explains well what is a FPGA and the difference between it and a microprocessor. It isn't for the faint of heart; as the author says, you need to be familiar with concepts of circuits (current and voltage) and programming knowledge is a plus. I'd say if you don't already have basic programming experience, you do need some to get much out of this. You also need to be facile with the computer. Commands like "source /opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/settings64.sh" are on page 11 of this book!The book also relies on proprietary hardware (that the author developed via a kickstarter) which would set you back between one a two hundred dollars. The lower end is a board and an accessory that lets you see inputs and outputs. The higher end is for other boards that add functionality, such as a microphone. You can get the basics out of what an FPGA is without the specific hardware, but much of the book relies on having it to try out the examples and they are specific to the hardware.Overall a great book, but maybe the MOJO hardware requirement can be in larger type on the cover.

We wanted to provide an inexpensive training platform to help train people on using Verilog/VHDL and programming and debugging FPGAs. Unfortunately, the author of the book decided to use the MOJO V3 from Embedded Micro as the target platform. For some inexplicable reason, the engineers at Embedded Micro decided to dumb down the experience to a "For Dummies" experience by writing some proprietary interface that uses some in-house designed IDE called "Lucid". If all you want to do is play with an FPGA, then this is an OK book. If you are looking to train in Verilog or VHDL, it's pretty useless. No Engineering company is going to let you use LUCID to design a real product.

More like 4.5/5!A great book!But to learn properly, you need the kit to try out as you read.FPGAs are now hot. Several AI/ML folks and companies (and even Microsoft) have started using FPGAs for offloading some of the CNN algorithms etc. This book has arrived at the right time. Traditional FPGA programming has a steep curve and varies a bit between the two major vendors of FPGAs - Altera (Intel) and Xilinx. This book takes us a bit higher at a functional level and lets us worry about problem domain than dealing with the low level too much to get it working; While it says beginners, you need to have some rudimentary knowledge about hardware anyway; (obviously you won't read this book otherwise)Good read and well worth for hardware engineers and those who work very closely with the hardware (like me).

Good book but a bit outdated now.