The Designer's Guide to VHDL, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Generics

The models that we have used as examples in preceding chapters all have fixed behavior and structure. In many respects, this is a limitation, and we would like to be able to write more general, or generic, models. VHDL provides us with a mechanism, called generics, for writing parameterized models. We discuss generics in this chapter and show how they may be used to write families of models with varying behavior and structure.

Generic Constants

The simplest form of generic model is parameterized by one or more generic constants. These are constants that cannot be changed within a design unit, but whose values are set when the design unit is initialized. We can write an entity with generic constants by including a generic interface ...