SystemVerilog for Design Second Edition: A Guide to Using SystemVerilog for Hardware Design and Modeling

by Stuart Sutherland, Simon Davidmann, Peter Flake

SystemVerilog is a rich set of extensions to the IEEE 1364-2001 Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog HDL). These extensions address two major aspects of HDL-based design. First, modeling very large designs with concise, accurate, and intuitive code. Second, writing high-level test programs to efficiently and effectively verify these large designs.


The first edition of this book addressed the first aspect of the SystemVerilog extensions to Verilog. Important modeling features were presented, such as two-state data types, enumerated types, user-degined types, structures, unions, and interfaces. Emphasis was placed on the proper usage of these enhancements for simulation and synthesis.


SystemVerilog for Design, Second Edition has been extensively revised on a chapter by chapter basis to include the many text and example updates needed to reflect changes that were made between the first edition of this book was written and the finalization of the new standard. It is important that the book reflect these syntax and semantic changes to the SystemVerilog language.


In addition, the second edition features a new chapter that explanis the SystemVerilog "packages", a new appendix that summarizes the synthesis guidelines presented throughout the book, and all of the code examples have been updated to the final syntax and rerun using the latest version of the Synopsys, Mentor, and Cadance tools.

Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2006

About the author

British Psychologist Norman Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998), always known professionally as Stuart Sutherland, was a British psychologist and writer.

Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.

Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.

Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.