VHDL stands for VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuits) Hardware Description Language. In the mid-1980’s the U.S. Department of Defense and the IEEE sponsored the development of this hardware description language with the goal to develop very high-speed integrated circuit. It has become now one of industry’s standard languages used to describe digital systems. The other widely used hardware description language is Verilog. Both are powerful languages that allow you to describe and simulate complex digital systems. A third HDL language is ABEL (Advanced Boolean Equation Language) which was specifically designed for Programmable Logic Devices (PLD). ABEL is less powerful than the other two languages and is less popular in industry. This tutorial deals with VHDL, as described by the IEEE standard 1076-1993.
Although these languages look similar as conventional programming languages, there are some important differences. A hardware description language is inherently parallel, i.e. commands, which correspond to logic gates, are executed (computed) in parallel, as soon as a new input arrives. A HDL program mimics the behavior of a physical, usually digital, system. It also allows incorporation of timing specifications (gate delays) as well as to describe a system as an interconnection of different components.
VHDL was originally developed at the behest of the US Department of Defense in order to document the behavior of the ASICs that supplier companies were including in equipment. That is to say, VHDL was developed as an alternative to huge, complex manuals which were subject to implementation-specific details.
The idea of being able to simulate 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. Modern synthesis tools can extract RAM, counter, and arithmetic blocks out of the code, and implement them according to what the user specifies. Thus, the same VHDL code could be synthesized differently for lowest area, lowest power consumption, highest clock speed, or other requirements.
VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concepts (for example, the slice notation for indexing part of a one-dimensional array) and syntax. VHDL has constructs to handle the parallelism inherent in hardware designs, but these constructs (processes) differ in syntax from the parallel constructs in Ada (tasks). Like Ada, VHDL is strongly-typed and is not case sensitive. There are many features of VHDL which are not found in Ada, such as an extended set of Boolean operators including nand and nor, in order to represent directly operations which are common in hardware. VHDL also allows arrays to be indexed in either direction (ascending or descending) because both conventions are used in hardware, whereas Ada (like most programming languages) provides ascending indexing only. The reason for the similarity between the two languages is that the Department of Defense required 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.
The initial version of VHDL, designed to IEEE standard 1076-1987, included a wide range of data types, including numerical (integer and real), logical (bit and boolean), character and time, plus arrays of bit called bit_vector and of character called string.
A problem not solved by this edition, however, was "multi-valued logic", where a signal's drive strength (none, weak or strong) and unknown values are also considered. This required IEEE standard 1164, which defined the 9-value logic types: scalar std_ulogic and its vector version std_ulogic_vector.
The second issue of IEEE 1076, in 1993, made the syntax more consistent, allowed more flexibility in naming, extended the character type to allow ISO-8859-1 printable characters, added the xnor operator, etc.
Minor changes in the standard (2000 and 2002) added the idea of protected types (similar to the concept of class in C++) and removed some restrictions from port mapping rules.
In addition to IEEE standard 1164, several child standards were introduced to extend functionality of the language. IEEE standard 1076.2 added better handling of real and complex data types. IEEE standard 1076.3 introduced signed and unsigned types to facilitate arithmetical operations on vectors. IEEE standard 1076.1 (known as VHDL-AMS) provided analog and mixed-signal circuit design extensions.
Some other standards support wider use of VHDL, notably VITAL (VHDL Initiative Towards ASIC Libraries) and microwave circuit design extensions.
In June 2006, VHDL Technical Committee of Accellera (delegated by IEEE to work on next update of the standard) approved so called Draft 3.0 of VHDL-2006. While maintaining full compatibility with older versions, this proposed standard provides numerous extensions that make writing and managing VHDL code easier. Key changes include incorporation of child standards (1164, 1076.2, 1076.3) into the main 1076 standard, an extended set of operators, more flexible syntax of 'case' and 'generate' statements, incorporation of VHPI (interface to C/C++ languages) and a subset of PSL (Property Specification Language). These changes should improve quality of synthesizable VHDL code, make testbenches more flexible, and allow wider use of VHDL for system-level descriptions.
In February 2008, Accellera approved VHDL 4.0 also informally known as VHDL 2008, which addressed more than 90 issues discovered during the trial period for version 3.0 and includes enhanced generic types. In 2008, Accellera plans to release VHDL 4.0 to the IEEE for balloting for inclusion in IEEE 1076-2008.
