Verilog & SystemVerilog Silicon Masterclass
The complete path from your first always block to closing timing on a real
design. Every volume contrasts three things explicitly: what the simulator
does, what the synthesis tool builds, and what an interviewer
will grill you on.
Start here
If you have never written HDL before, begin at Volume 01 and work forward - the volumes are ordered so that each one only depends on the ones before it. If you are revising for an interview in the next 48 hours, skip straight to Volume 10 (formula vault and rapid drills) and Volume 11 (the interview vault).
How to actually learn this
Read the theory, then copy the RTL into a simulator and break it deliberately. Change a
<= to =, delete a default branch, remove a reset -
then look at what the waveform and the synthesis report say. The bugs you cause on purpose
are the ones you will recognise instantly in an interview.
Full syllabus
Part I - Foundations
- 01 The Silicon Foundation & Simulation Engine Internals Hardware concurrency, the IEEE 1364 stratified event queue, 4-state logic and drive strengths, blocking vs non-blocking, and accidental latch inference. Live
- 02 Synthesizable Combinational Logic & Arithmetic Datapaths MUX/decoder/priority-encoder architectures, carry-lookahead adders, a 32-bit RISC-V style ALU, Booth multipliers, and population count. Live
- 03 Sequential Circuit Design & Edge-Triggered Realities Master-slave DFF physics, sync vs async reset trade-offs, the AASD reset synchronizer, modulo-N counters, LFSRs, and odd-integer clock dividers. Live
Part II - Industrial design
- 04 Industrial Finite State Machines & Protocol Controllers Moore vs Mealy vs Medvedev, the three coding styles and why style 3 dominates, one-hot vs Gray encoding, and safe FSM design for mission-critical chips. Live
- 05 Clock Domain Crossing & Reset Synchronizers Metastability physics and the MTBF equation, 2-FF synchronizers, why they fail on multi-bit buses, handshake synchronizers, and reset domain crossing. Live
- 06 Advanced Memory Architectures & FIFO Engineering SRAM array structure, single-clock FIFOs, the dual-clock asynchronous FIFO with Gray-code pointers, and burst-transfer depth sizing. Live
- 07 Static Timing Analysis & Timing Closure The fundamental timing equations, setup and hold slack, why hold violations kill silicon, clock skew and jitter, and SDC constraints. Live
Part III - SystemVerilog
-
08
SystemVerilog for Design (IEEE 1800-2017)
2-state vs 4-state types, enums and structs,
always_comb/always_ffsynthesis intent, interfaces and modports, packages and$cast. Live - 09 SystemVerilog for Verification (OOP, CRV & SVA) fork/join variants, classes and polymorphism, mailboxes and semaphores, constrained randomisation, functional coverage, assertions, and the UVM component tree. Live
Part IV - Interview preparation
- 10 High-Yield Rapid Revision & Master Formula Vault Every closed-form formula on one page, golden comparison matrices, ten "spot the silicon bug" drills, and 50 active-recall flashcards. Live
- 11 The Big-Tech Silicon Interview Master Vault Top 25 digital design problems, top 15 SystemVerilog verification problems, and real-world silicon bug case studies including the Pentium FDIV defect. Live
What you need before starting
| Requirement | Why it matters | Free option |
|---|---|---|
| Boolean algebra & K-maps | Every combinational block reduces to this | Any first-year digital logic text |
| A Verilog simulator | You cannot learn HDL by reading alone | Icarus Verilog + GTKWave, or EDA Playground in-browser |
| Basic CMOS intuition | Volume 01 starts at the transistor | Covered from first principles in §1.1 |
All eleven volumes are live
The course is complete - 11 volumes, 52 sub-modules, free and with no signup. If you are
revising for an interview, start at
Volume 10 for the
formula vault and 50 flashcards, then
Volume 11 for 40
worked interview problems. When you are ready to put this RTL on real silicon, continue to
Course 02 - FPGA Mastery, which is also complete.
Subscribe on YouTube
for the next course.
Previous
-
Next
Vol 01 - The Silicon Foundation