VHDL Primer. Jan Van der Spiegel University of Pennsylvania Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering VHDL Tutorial 1 1. Introduction. 1 2. 3. Behavioral model 5 Concurrency. 6 Structural description. 6 4. 5. Constant 11 Variable. 12 Signal 12 6. Integer types. 15 Floating-point types. 15 Physical types. 16 Array Type. 17 Record Type. 19 Signal attributes. 20 Scalar attributes. 21 Array attributes. 22 7. 8. Basic Loop statement 31 While-Loop statement 32 For-Loop statement 32 9. 10. 11. Appendix: IEEE Standard Package STD_LOGIC_1164 This tutorial gives a brief overview of the VHDL language and is mainly intended as a companion for the Digital Design Laboratory.
VHDL stands for VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuits) Hardware Description Language. Although these languages look similar as conventional programming languages, there are some important differences. A digital system can be represented at different levels of abstraction [1]. Figure 1: Levels of abstraction: Behavioral, Structural and Physical a. B. C. VHDL-Handbook.