Which HDL is the most popular, and should I learn VHDL or Verilog?
That’s a question I often get asked, and it’s understandable. People want to future-proof their learning by betting on the winning horse.
But which one is it, and does it matter?
Author: Jonas Julian Jensen
There are controversies in the VHDL community about how you can and shouldn’t use subprograms. Some say you should avoid using functions or procedures in synthesizable (RTL) code.
While there are debatable subjective reasons to restrict the use of subprograms, many of these beliefs stem from myths or misconceptions. Therefore, I’m writing this article to give you clarity and understanding of subprograms so you can decide for yourself.
The ready/valid hardware data transfer protocol is simple and ingenious, providing flow control with only two control signals. The rules are straightforward: data transfer only happens when both ready and valid are ‘1’ during the same clock cycle.
A binary operator is an operator that takes exactly two arguments. Examples of such are addition or multiplication and, of course, the familiar Boolean logical operators we use in VHDL: and, or nand nor xor and xnor.
VHDL groups operators into classes with different precedence levels. Operators are evaluated according to their classes, starting with the highest level. Operators of the same class don’t have any predefined priority. Instead, they are evaluated left-to-right in the order they appear in the code.
This article shows how to work with strings containing line breaks in VHDL. Read on to learn how to split long lines in your VHDL code, print text containing newline characters, and how VHDL differs from regular programming languages regarding non-printing control characters in strings.
The ‘stable and ‘quiet attributes are predefined in the VHDL standard and work on signal objects. We can use these special features in simulation to check that a signal’s value remains untouched for a given period.
Many people struggle to understand the ModelSim/QuestaSim VHDL simulator’s workflow. I think that’s unnecessary because the basic workflow isn’t hard to learn.
I regard the graphical user interface (GUI) as a front-end for the commands listed in this article. For example, when you click the Compile button in the ModelSim GUI, it runs the vcom command back-end. The screenshot below shows the command echoed to the transcript window after we click the Compile button.
Professional VHDL simulators are more expensive than most individuals can afford. But fortunately, there are many free and legal alternatives that you can download and install.
Microsoft Windows is the easiest to install on, but many simulators also have a Linux version. FPGA vendors usually only support the Red Hat Linux distribution. But with a little effort, you can make it work in other distros, including Ubuntu.
Mac OS is the most challenging platform because there’s only one open-source simulator that works natively.
Text strings in VHDL are generally limited to fixed-length character arrays. That makes sense because VHDL describes hardware, and generic-length strings require dynamic memory.
To define an array of strings, you have to allocate space at compile-time for the highest number of strings you want to store. And even worse, you must decide on the strings’ max length and pad every occurrence to that number of characters. The code below shows an example usage of such a construct.