Book excerpt: This book concentrates on common classes of hardware architectures and design problems, and focuses on the process of transitioning design requirements into synthesizable HDL code. Using his extensive, wide-ranging experience in computer architecture and hardware design, as well as in his training and consulting work, Ben provides numerous examples of real-life designs illustrated with VHDL and Verilog code. This code is shown in a way that makes it easy for the reader to gain a greater understanding of the languages and how they compare. All code presented in the book is included on the companion CD, along with other information, such as application notes.