Quick Start Guide to VHDL

Quick Start Guide to VHDL

The classical digital design approach (i.e., manual synthesis and minimization of logic) quickly becomes impractical as systems become more complex. This is the motivation for the modern digital design flow, which uses hardware description languages (HDL) and computer-aided synthesis/minimization to create the final circuitry. The purpose of this book is to provide a quick start guide to the VHDL language, which is one of the two most common languages used to describe logic in the modern digital design flow. This book is intended for anyone that has already learned the classical digital design approach and is ready to begin learning HDL-based design. This book is also suitable for practicing engineers that already know VHDL and need quick reference for syntax and examples of common circuits. This book assumes that the reader already understands digital logic (i.e., binary numbers, combinational and sequential logic design, finite state machines, memory, and binary arithmetic basics)