A VHDL Primer - Jayaram Bhasker(American Telephone and Telegraph Company Bell Laboratories)

VHDL is a hardware description language that can be used to model a digital system. It contains elements that can be used to describe the behavior or structure of the digital system, with the provision for specifying its timing explicitly. The language provides support for modeling the system hierarchically and also supports top-down and bottom-up design methodologies. The system and its subsystems can be described at any level of abstraction ranging from the architecture level to gate level. Precise simulation semantics are associated with all the language constructs, and therefore, models written in this language can be verified using a VHDL simulator.
The aim of this book is to introduce the VHDL language to the reader at the beginner's level. No prior knowledge of the language is required. The reader is, however, assumed to have some knowledge of a high-level programming language, like C or Pascal, and a basic understanding of hardware design. This text is intended for both software and hardware designers interested in learning VHDL with no specific emphasis being placed on either discipline.
VHDL is a large and verbose language with many complex constructs that have complex semantic meanings and is difficult to understand initially (VHDL is often quoted to be an acronym for Very Hard Description Language). However, it is possible to quickly understand a subset of VHDL which is both simple and easy to use. The emphasis of this text is on presenting this set of simple and commonly used features of the language so that the reader can start writing models in VHDL. These features are powerful enough to be able to model designs of large degrees of complexity.
This book is not intended to replace the IEEE Standard VHDL Language Reference Manual, the official language guide, but to complement it by explaining the complex constructs of the language using an example-based approach. Emphasis is placed on providing illustrative examples that explain the different formulations of the language constructs and their semantics. The complete syntax of language constructs is often not described, instead, the most common usage of these constructs are presented. Syntax for constructs is written in a self-explanatory fashion rather than through the use of formal terminology (the Backus-Naur Form) that is used in the Language Reference Manual. This text does not cover the entire language but concentrates on the most useful aspects.
Categories:ECE, ELECTRONICS
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