14
Synthesis
Introduction
The original intention of VHDL was to have a design specification
language for digital circuits. The main goal of the work was to have
a design representation that could be simulated to test whether the
specification was fit for purpose. When VHDL was standardized as
IEEE Std 1076, the broader application of VHDL for not just simu-
lation but as an integral part of the hardware design flow became
possible.
The original method of designing digital circuits was primarily
through the development of schematic-based designs, using gate
libraries to effectively generate Register Transfer Logic (RTL)
netlists directly from the schematics. This is clearly a reasonable
technique when the designs are relatively small, however it quickl