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Concept
VHDL
Summary
The VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is a hardware description language (HDL) that can model the behavior and structure of digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from the system level down to that of logic gates, for design entry, documentation, and verification purposes. Since 1987, VHDL has been standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as IEEE Std 1076; the latest version of which is IEEE Std 1076-2019. To model analog and mixed-signal systems, an IEEE-standardized HDL based on VHDL called VHDL-AMS (officially IEEE 1076.1) has been developed.
VHDL is named after the United States Department of Defense program that created it, the Very High Speed Integrated Circuits Program (VHSIC). In the early 1980s, the VHSIC Program sought a new HDL for use in the design of the integrated circuits it aimed to develop. The product of this effort was VHDL Version 7.2, released in 1985. The effort to standardize it as an IEEE standard began in the following year.
In 1983, VHDL was originally developed at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense in order to document the behavior of the ASICs that supplier companies were including in equipment. The standard MIL-STD-454N in Requirement 64 in section 4.5.1 "ASIC documentation in VHDL" explicitly requires documentation of "Microelectronic Devices" in VHDL.
The idea of being able to simulate the ASICs from the information in this documentation was so obviously attractive that logic simulators were developed that could read the VHDL files. The next step was the development of logic synthesis tools that read the VHDL and output a definition of the physical implementation of the circuit.
Due to the Department of Defense requiring as much of the syntax as possible to be based on Ada, in order to avoid re-inventing concepts that had already been thoroughly tested in the development of Ada, VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concept and syntax.
Official source
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