Amazon.com info for 'Application-Specific Integrated Circuits'

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Back to reviews and details of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits

Amazon.com reviews:

Rating: 4 Summary: Detailed and exhaustive but outdated
Comment As an ASIC design engineer, I liked the concept of this book and the breadth of the material covered. This book is broadly divided into two parts - one on FPGA's/PLD's and one on custom ASIC's (the author refers to all of these as ASIC's). The FPGA section covers programmable cells, i/o cells interconnects and design software for some devices of Xilinx, Altera and Actel. I found these sections informative but a bit boring. As you may expect from a nearly 10 year old book, most of the information is outdated. The ASIC's section consists of chapters on HDL's (you are better off reading a separate book on Verilog/VHDL), synthesis, simulation, test, floorplannng, placement and routing. I found these sections much more useful. The writing style is incoherent in many places and very informal throughout. This book is better suited for a reference to a practising engineer than for a college textbook.

Rating: 5 Summary: This is the best ASIC book I have read.
Comment Fantastic book! Complete and very informative.

Rating: 5 Summary: This book is well written
Comment I saw the review (November 17) below that dislikes the explanations, editing, and style - and have to say I disagree. I think this must be a student in the UCI class who screwed up the first homework. This book is well-written. Read the beginning of Chapter 2 here, online, and read the other reviews.

Rating: 2 Summary: Find a better book
Comment This book is comprehensive, yes, but the explanations are poor. I find his writing style difficult to follow. The book is poorly edited as well, for example, the second chapter introduces datapath logic cells and then immediately goes into a multipage treatise of multiplier architecture. Interesting information but it seems much out of place given the context. The problems are not very helpful either. Often you will need to search for information outside of the text in order to complete the question. The author obviously knows the subject well, I just don't think he does a very good job of teaching it.

Rating: 5 Summary: Great Starter and Reference
Comment Smith's text is an excellent introductory text to those you are curious of the details of ASIC design. This was my first book on ASIC design and I still reference it often. A must read if you are an ASIC designer.