About the Course

Introduction to HDL

Hardware description language (HDL) is a computer aided design (CAD) tool for the modern design and synthesis of digital systems. The recent, steady advances in semiconductor technology continue to increase the power and complexity of digital systems. Due to their complexity, such systems cannot be realized using discrete integrated circuits. They are usually realized using high density, programmable chips, such as application specific Integrated circuits (ASICs) and Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and require sophisticated CAD tools. HDL is an integral part of such tools. HDL offers the designer a very efficient tool for implementing and synthesizing designs on chips.

The two widely used hardware description languages are VHDL and Verilog. These languages provide support for modeling the system hierarchically and also supports top down and bottom up design methodologies. The system and its subsystems can be described at any level of abstraction ranging from the architecture level to the gate level. The complex constructs and features of these languages are enough to be able to model designs with high degrees of complexity .

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