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VHDL

VHDL [4] is the official standard for the description of logic circuits that are designed for the DoD, the Department of Defense of the United States. VHDL can be used to describe any logic circuit on any possible level, although it is best suited to descriptions on higher levels of abstraction.

Because it is impossible to provide a complete overview of VHDL in a short space, we only outline the main characteristics needed to understand the aspects typical to VHDL simulation. Figure shows a small example of a circuit.

Every circuit in VHDL consists of a number of processes interconnected by signals. A signal can be seen as a wire running from one process to another.

Every process has a description in the form of sequential code. This code describes how the process reacts to changes on incoming signals and how it drives outgoing signals. The code that is used in these sequential parts is very similar to Ada, augmented with a number of typical VHDL features, the most important being the wait statement and the waveform assignment. They are used in the following example:


entity Nor_Gate is
   port( a, b: in Bit; y: out Bit );
end Nor_Gate;

architecture demo of Nor_Gate is begin process begin y <= a nor b after 10 ns; wait on a, b; end process; end demo;

In this example we can see the definition of an entity called quot;Nor_Gatequot;. This entity has an interface consisting of two incoming signals and one outgoing signal, as specified by the quot;portquot;-clause. Below the definition of the entity, an implementation is defined, consisting of one process that contains two statements: The waveform assignment does not directly influence the value of the signal, it only schedules a future change. Even if the delay is zero, the signal is only changed in the next simulation cycle.

After the initialisation of all values, and the execution of every process until it suspends, the simulation cycle starts. It consists of two separate phases:

The VHDL simulation cycle closely resembles that of event driven simulation.

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