The Designer's Guide to VHDL, 2nd Edition

A Synthesis

In this book we have discussed many aspects of VHDL and looked at examples of its use. One very strong motivation for using VHDL is hardware synthesis. The idea behind synthesis is to allow us to think of our design in abstract terms. We need not be so concerned about how best to implement the design in hardware logic-that is the job of the synthesis tool. It converts our abstract description into a structural description at a lower level of abstraction.

This appendix offers a brief introduction to synthesis, based on the IEEE standards that cover synthesis of VHDL models. A full coverage of the topic warrants a complete book in its own right. We refer the interested reader to the large number of books on hardware synthesis (for ...