RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL: Coding for Efficiency, Portability, and Scalability

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL SYSTEM DESIGN

Developing and producing a digital system is a complicated process and involves many tasks. The design and synthesis of a register transfer level circuit, which is the focus of this book, is only one of the tasks. In this chapter, we present an overview of device technologies, system representation, development flow and software tools. This helps us to better understand the role of the design and synthesis task in the overall development and production process.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Digital hardware has experienced drastic expansion and improvement in the past 40 years. Since its introduction, the number of transistors in a single chip has grown exponentially, and a silicon chip now routinely contains hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of millions of transistors. In the past, the major applications of digital hardware were computational systems. However, as the chip became smaller, faster, cheaper and more capable, many electronic, control, communication and even mechanical systems have been “digitized” internally, using digital circuits to store, process and transmit information.

As applications become larger and more complex, the task of designing digital circuits becomes more difficult. The best way to handle the complexity is to view the circuit at a more abstract level and utilize software tools to derive the low-level implementation. This approach shields us from the tedious details and allows us to concentrate and explore high-level ...