Digital Design and Computer Architecture, RISC-V Edition: RISC-V Edition

Concise and complete.

The book is excellent for anyone interested in designing RISC-V processor. It includes examples in system verilog and VHDL. The thing I like most are the YouTube lectures for all topics. One can watch some of the videos before buying the book.

Book arrived very good packaged, save and sound. So far I'm happy with the content of the book. It seams to go quite well into details.

The material:So far I'm about half way though, but the resources in the book and referenced online are amazing. I did learn much of what's in chapters 1-4 in the class roop, but it does serve as a great refresher on how digital systems work.Kindle Edition:Don't. Just don't. I bought the kindle edition but had to acquire the text as a pdf to help with readability. For this and other text books, I'd strongly recommend buying the hard copy.At a glance, continuous scrolling with narrower margins and white background seems to help, but it still doesn't flow like how the authors intended. More effort to preserve the formatting needs to be done on Amazon's part than just converting a docx.

I am an instructor, and we use this textbook to teach Computer Architecture. I enjoyed reading it and thought the authors wrote in a simple and understandable style. They introduced and built on concepts throughout the book, providing detailed explanations and a wealth of information. The book can be read cover-to-cover or used as a reference. It offers many circuits, designs, and relevant information for each topic.The textbook uses examples throughout each chapter to work through problems and designs. At the end of each chapter, there are numerous exercise problems that cover the material, with solutions to odd-numbered exercises provided through an online supplement on the authors’ website. Additionally, the authors include sample interview questions that have been asked during real job interviews—something worth looking at if you’re preparing for one!Classroom materials are provided via online supplements, which include lecture slides, textbook figures, solutions to odd-numbered exercises, links to lecture videos, hands-on labs, HDL code, and supplementary chapters/appendices. Other instructor resources are available from the publisher’s website. However, a note about the labs: the FPGA and simulation tools used in the book are already several versions out-of-date and do not match the descriptions exactly as outlined in the labs, so they had to be adapted. For instance, ModelSim has now been replaced by the Intel Questa simulator, which requires registration for a free license. The RED-V board used in the labs is out of stock. However, there was a very good and easy-to-use RISC-V simulator called Venus available on the web, which is also used in the labs.One quirk in the textbook is that the RISC-V Instruction Set Summary (Appendix B) is missing a page (it appears blank). Fortunately, we were able to download a complete PDF version from the authors’ website, which contains the full instruction set.Overall, Digital Design and Computer Architecture – RISC-V edition is a well-written textbook with a few quirks. I found it to be an enjoyable read, and the resources provided have been immensely useful in the classroom. I am grateful to the authors for their efforts and recommend this book to those seeking an excellent pedagogical approach to teaching and learning computer architecture using the RISC-V instruction set.

Assumes no prior background and does a great job of covering both digital logic design and architecture at both undergraduate and graduate level. Comes with easy to follow working examples and instructor resources that can be used for both in class use and assessment. I really liked the RISC V edition given its relevance today and how David and Sarah build up the subject from the ground up.

As always Sarah Harris and David Harris do an amazing job at explaining very complex problems in digital logic and computer architecture design. This is a book that belongs on everyone's shelf who does any work in digital logic design. Moreover, Chapter 4 on HDL design is so valuable in itself. I would rate this a must buy for anyone who deals with computer-based technology.

The kindle edition has serious formatting issues with code examples that interfere with readability. The code examples contain a lot of spurious blank lines and some characters like the & (AND) operator in SystemVerilog are not rendered properly. For example, & is shown as & See attached picture which shows both issues.