TABLE OF CONTENTS VHDL stands for Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (HDL). It is a language for describing digital electronic systems. It was born out of the United States Government s VHSIC program in 1980 and was adopted as a standard for describing the structure and function of Integrated Circuits (IC). Soon after it was developed and adopted as a standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) in the US (IEEE-1076 1987) and in other countries [76], [77]. VHDL continues to evolve. Although new standards have been prepared (VHDL-93) most commercial VHDL tools use 1076 1987 version of VHDL, thus making it the most compatible when using different compilation tools.
VHDL enables the user to:
Describe the design structure; specify how it is decomposed into subdesigns, and how these sub-designs are interconnected.
Specify the function of designs using a familiar, c-like programming language form.
Simulate the design before being sending it for fabrication, so that designers have a chance to rapidly compare alternative results and test for correctness without delay and expense of multiple prototyping.
VHDL is a C-like a general purpose programming language with extensions to model both concurrent and sequential flows of execution and allows delayed assignment of values. To a first approximation VHDL can be considered to be a combination of two languages: one describing the structure of the integrated circuit and its interconnections (structural description) and the other one describing its behaviour using algorithmic constructs (behavioural description).
VHDL...
