VHDL, which stands for Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language, is a hardware description language used to model the behavior and structure of digital systems at various levels of abstraction, from the system level down to logic gates. It is commonly used for design entry, documentation, and verification purposes in electronic design automation to express mixed-signal and digital systems, such as integrated circuits (ICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) .
VHDL is a dataflow language, allowing every statement to be considered for execution simultaneously, unlike procedural computing languages such as BASIC, C, and assembly code, where a sequence of statements is run sequentially. It is also used for simulation and synthesis of electronic designs, where synthesis involves compiling and mapping VHDL into an implementation technology such as an FPGA or an ASIC.
The language was initiated by the US Department of Defense in the early 1980s, and since 1987, it has been standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as IEEE Std 1076. VHDL has evolved into a mature language in digital circuit design, simulation, and synthesis, and it is widely used in the industry for designing hardware and creating test entities to verify the behavior of that hardware.
In summary, VHDL is a crucial tool in the field of digital circuit design, providing a means to describe the behavior of electronic circuits, particularly digital circuits, and is defined by IEEE standards.
