Chapter 2 provides an overview on the design, usage and capability of a hardware description language. A series of simple codes is used to introduce the basic modeling concepts of VHDL. | Hardware Description Language RTL Hardware Design by P. Chu Chapter 2 1 Outline 1. Overview on hardware description language 2. Basic VHDL Concept via an example 3. VHDL in development flow RTL Hardware Design by P. Chu Chapter 2 2 1. Overview on hardware description language RTL Hardware Design by P. Chu Chapter 2 3 Programming language • Can we use C or Java as HDL? • A computer programming language – Semantics (“meaning”) – Syntax (“grammar”) • Develop of a language – Study the characteristics of the underlying processes – Develop syntactic constructs and their associated semantics to model and express these characteristics. RTL Hardware Design by P. Chu Chapter 2 4 Traditional PL • Modeled after a sequential process – Operations performed in a sequential order – Help human's thinking process to develop an algorithm step by step – Resemble the operation of a basic computer model RTL Hardware Design by P. Chu Chapter .
