·  Excellent hardware description language (HDL) coverage. Synthesizable VHDL, Verilog, and SystemC coverage all appear in the last chapter, with subsections corresponding to earlier chapters, allowing early or late HDL introduction, without cluttering main concepts. Accompanying VHDL/Verilog books allow deeper coverage or use in a subsequent course. 

·  Appropriate emphasis on RTL. Topic coverage naturally leads to register-transfer-level (RTL) design, which is covered substantially. Comparisons between custom digital circuit and microprocessor implementations provide a modern perspective.

·  Modern coverage of optimization and tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are introduced alongside optimization, at all levels of abstraction (not just gate level), and cleanly distinguished from basic design.

·  Bottom-up description of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGA coverage shows precisely how circuits can be mapped to lookup tables and switch matrices using bitstreams.