Preface
I have spent more than 30 years toiling away as a digital hardware design engineer and as an unsophisticated self-taught software designer. Most of my software efforts were in support of my hardware designs and included endeavors such as bit-level simulations, microcode generation, assembly code, FORTRAN, C/C++, and writing Microsoft Windows application graphics-oriented test stations, which I utilized to verify the proper operation of my digital creations.
I began my digital design career when digital signal processing (DSP) was still in its infancy. In those days, all digital designs were implemented with small-scale integrated (SSI) circuits that weren’t much more sophisticated than 4-bit adders and 8- to 1-bit multiplexers. The first ...