Top-Down Digital VLSI Design

Chapter 4

Circuit Modeling with Hardware Description Languages

Abstract

To allow for simulation and circuit synthesis, a VLSI architecture gets captured using a Hardware Description Language (HDL). As industry is divided into users of VHDL and of SystemVerilog, the book introduces both, each in a major section of its own. The underlying ideas such as circuit hierarchy, connectivity, interacting concurrent processes, discrete models for electrical phenomena, the event queue mechanism, and facilities for keeping circuit models parametrized and re-usable are explained. To help getting started with circuit modeling, VHDL and SystemVerilog examples are given for registers, for combinational logic according to various coding styles, and for all ...