The Designer's Guide to VHDL is both a comprehensive manual for the language and an authoritative reference on its use in hardware design at all levels, from the system level to the gate level. Using the IEEE standard for VHDL, the author presents the entire description language and builds a modeling methodology based on successful software engineering techniques. Requiring only a minimal background in programming, this is an excellent tutorial for anyone in computer architecture, digital systems engineering, or CAD. The book is organized so that it can be either read cover-to-cover for a comprehensive tutorial or kept deskside as a reference to the language. Each chapter introduces a number of related concepts or language facilities and illustrates each one with examples. Scattered throughout the book are four case studies, which bring together preceding material in the form of extended worked examples. All of the examples and case studies, complete with test drivers for running the VHDL code, are available via the World Wide Web. In addition, each chapter is followed by a set of related exercises.