This book offers a comprehensive treatment of VHDL and its applications to the design and simulation of real, industry-standard electronic circuits. It focuses on the use of VHDL rather than solely on the language itself. In other words, besides explaining VHDL in detail, it shows why, how, and which type of circuits are inferred from the language constructs.

The book also includes a detailed analysis of circuit simulation with VHDL test benches in all of the four categories (nonautomated, fully automated, functional and timing) of simulations. A rigorous discussion is thus made between VHDL for synthesis and VHDL for simulations.
In a nutshell, the book teaches all the indispensable features of VHDL. It also reviews the fundamental concepts of digital electronics and digital design, resulting in a very practical, self contained approach.

In both synthesis and simulation cases the VHDL codes in all design examples are complete, and include circuit diagrams, physical synthesis in FPGAs (Field  Programmable Gate Arrays), simulation results, and explanatory comments.

All of the four VHDL editions (1987, 1993, 2002 and 2008) are covered.

The book is mainly intended for the students of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. It will also be useful to the VHDL and digital design engineers and practitioners in the industry.

“Volnei Pedroni explains what designers really need to know to build hardware with VHDL. This book sets the standard for how hardware description languages should be taught.”

—David Money Harris
Professor of Engineering
Harvey Mudd College

I.   CIRCUIT-LEVEL VHDL
1.   Introduction
2.   Code Structure
3.   Data Types
4.   Operators and Attributes
5.   Concurrent Code
6.   Sequential Code
7.   SIGNAL and VARIABLE
II.  SYSTEM-LEVEL VHDL
8.   PACKAGE and COMPONENT
9.   FUNCTION and PROCEDURE
10. Simulation with VHDL Testbenches
III. EXTENDED AND ADVANCED DESIGNS
11. VHDL Design of State Machines
12. VHDL Design with Basic Displays
13. VHDL Design of Memory Circuits
14. VHDL Design of Serial Communications Circuits
15. VHDL Design of VGA Video Interfaces
16. VHDL Design of DVI Video Interfaces
17. VHDL Design of FPD-Link Video Interfaces
Appendices
Bibliography
Index