Design Recipes for FPGAs: Using Verilog and VHDL

3

A VHDL Primer: The Essentials

Introduction

This chapter of the book is not intended as a comprehensive VHDL

reference book – there are many excellent texts available that fit

that purpose including Mark Zwolinski’s Digital System Design

with VHDL, Zainalabedin Navabi’s VHDL: Analysis and modeling

of digital systems or Peter Ashenden’s Designer’s Guide to VHDL.

This section is designed to give concise and useful summary infor-

mation on important language constructs and usage in VHDL –

helpful and easy to use, but not necessarily complete.

This chapter will introduce the key concepts in VHDL and the

important syntax required for most VHDL designs, particularly

with reference to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In

most cases, the decision to use ...