Chapter 1. Fundamental Concepts

In this introductory chapter, we describe what we mean by digital system modeling and see why modeling and simulation are an important part of the design process. We see how the hardware description language VHDL can be used to model digital systems and introduce some of the basic concepts underlying the language. We complete this chapter with a description of the basic lexical and syntactic elements of the language, to form a basis for the detailed descriptions of language features that follow in later chapters.

Modeling Digital Systems

If we are to discuss the topic of modeling digital systems, we first need to agree on what a digital system is. Different engineers would come up with different definitions, depending ...

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