Mumbai University > ELECTRO > Sem 3 > Digital Circuits and Designs

Marks: 7M

Year: Dec 2013

• VHDL stands for VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) Hardware Description Language (HDL). It is a programming language for describing the behaviour of digital systems.

• . VHDL has constructs that enable to express the concurrent or sequential behaviour of digital system with or without timing. It also allows interconnecting components.

• VHDL can be used at different complexity levels from single transistor up to complete systems like microcontrollers and complex chips, all integrated into the same working environment.

• The language supports both synchronous and asynchronous timing models. It allows to capture circuit behaviour for automatic circuit synthesis or for system simulation.

• VHDL supports different types of modelling, viz Structural, Dataflow, Behavioural and Mixed. It supports hierarchy so digital systems can be modelled as a set of interconnected components or subcomponents.

• One of the main features of VHDL is to capture the performance specification for a circuit, in the form of what is commonly referred to as a test bench. Test benches can be written using the same language to test other VHDL models.

• The language can be written using the same language to test order VHDL models.