The Designer's Guide to VHDL, 2nd Edition

13 Components and Configurations

In Chapter 5 we saw how to write entity declarations and architecture bodies that describe the structure of a system. Within an architecture body, we can write component instantiation statements that describe instances of an entity and connect signals to the ports of the instances. This simple approach to building a hierarchical design works well if we know in advance all the details of the entities we want to use. However, that is not always the case, especially in a large design project. In this chapter we introduce an alternative way of describing the hierarchical structure of a design that affords significantly more flexibility at the cost of a little more effort in managing the design.

13.1 Components ...