Overview

Digital systems are highly complex. At their most detailed level, they may consist of millions of elements, as would be the case if we viewed a system as a collection of logic gates or pass transistors. From a more abstract viewpoint, these elements may be grouped into a handful of functional components such as cache memories, floating point units, signal processors, or real-time controllers. Hardware description languages have evolved to aid in the design of systems with this large number of elements and wide range of electronic and logical abstractions.

The creative process of digital system design begins with a conceptual idea of a logical system to be built, a set of constraints that the final implementation must meet, and a set of primitive components from which to build the system. Design is an iterative process of either manually proposing or automatically synthesizing alternative solutions and then testing them with respect to the given constraints. The design is typically divided into many smaller subparts (following the well-known divide-and-conquer engineering approach) and each subpart is further divided, until the whole design is specified in terms of known primitive components.

The Verilog language provides the digital system designer with a means of describing a digital system at a wide range of levels of abstraction, and, at the same time, provides access to computer-aided design tools to aid in the design process at these levels. The language supports the early conceptual stages of design with its behavioral constructs, and the later implementation...