VHDL 101

Chapter 1. Introduction and Background

1.1. VHDL

VHDL. Four little letters. So much to understand.

There are many approaches to learning the Very-High-Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL). These range from the academic – where each piece is looked at, turned upside down and inside out, and fully understood at an atomic level, yet only a few understand how to actually USE the language to implement a design; to OJT¹ where an engineer may be handed either poorly written code (or in rare cases a well written piece of code), or nothing at all and told that they are now responsible for the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in the system.

¹On-The-Job-Training, most often this is a “sink-or-swim” scenario. Without a framework, ...