Textbooks

We will use two textbooks for the course, both of which should help develop your general engineering skills, as opposed to specific texts for FPGA programming. You'll get plenty of practice reading FPGA programming reference works (in addition to plenty of practice researching and finding such works).

The first text, The Pentium Chronicles by Bob Colwell, is a nice overview of the system development process. It is filled with useful insights and great anecdotes from Bob's time as Chief Architect of the Intel's P6 micro-architecture. Classroom discussions will use this book as foundational material to examine and dissect the design and implementation process.

The second book will not be the focus of class discussions, though it will be mentioned during lectures. This book, DeBugging, is intended to make each of you think systematically about the process you follow when chasing bugs. As you'll be doing plenty of bug hunts in this class (and for the rest of your engineering career), introspection and improvement of the process will have a profound effect on your engineering efficiency.

Both books are short and a very easy read. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading both -- much, much more than you enjoy most textbooks.