VHDL Motivation

Allen Dewey and Anthony Gadient

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

CN hange is inevitable in science and technology; designing and

$ ; Sfabricating government electronic systems is no exception.
N N m E l g Increasing complexity in defense systems and growing emphasis on
zcE ; = l I W design automation and IC technologies are changing the way gov-
Xhe ied
irn*caling ermnent procures and maintains complex electronic systems. In its
role as a standard representation for design information, VHDL
provides the government with a key element supporting advance-
;l~,dv m ment of electronic system design and fabrication.2 Moreover,
VHDL wil improve documentation and decrease design time and
2g~nussfl - cost for government electronic systems.

ram
w~: improving the documentation of
electronic systems
!w46~nwion Government electronic systems require stringent documentation
(Figure 1) because they have long life cycles and are deployed
around the world. Maintaining and upgrading electronic systems
VUOl p,vgr~n ~ while they are an active part of the inventory requires detailed, up-
to-date, and accurate documentation. English is too imprecise to
convey common understanding among designers and design auto-
mation tools: How can we adequately specify electronic system re-
quirements with levels of detail ranging from modes of sonar sys-
tem operation to logic circuit set-up-and-hold times? What are the
paradigms identifying qualitative design goals? What terminology
or "language" can we use to clearly convey system requirements?
As we increasingly automate design and maintenance functions
and as the complexity of electronic systems grows, traditional
description methods will become inadequate. A more precise hard-
ware description language will be required.

12 0740-7475/86/0400-0012$01.00 © 1986 IEEE IEEE DESIGN & TEST

 We initiated the VHDL program to ad-
dress the broad range of descriptive abilities System
required for advanced electronic system specification
documentation, and to establish a standard
for eliminating current diversity in hard-
ware description languages: 3
Computer-aided engineering (CAE)
is a nightmare of incompatible formats
and a Babel of different languages. No Hardware Software
standard hardware description lan- design program
guage exists, and because each manu- specification specification
facturer's workstation and software
forms an integrated package, trans-
lators must be devised. 4 HOL
HDL
Since VHDL can serve as a design auto- schematics flowcharts
mation tool interface, it can document the
electronic system during (instead of after) Hardware Tetsource
the design process. Therefore, VHDL more
accurately reflects a system's true properties prototype specification o code
and characteristics.

Decreasing system design 4F

Manufacturing Distribution
time and cost system system
The government will need a significant Figure 1. Documentation of government electronic systems.
number of custom ICs to meet perfor-
mance, reliability, and classification re-
quirements that off-the-shelf ICs won't
satisfy. Already in the $2 to $5 million
range, development costs of advanced ICs
must be reduced to economically meet
future government IC demands. VHDL
can reduce IC development time and ex-
pense by promoting repeated use of
previous design investments, and by pro-
viding a vehicle for more efficiently manag-
ing the design process among individual
designers or organizations.
When considering the development of
large electronic systems, the paradigm of
design as an iterative process building new
designs upon past designs is quite
powerful.5 Similarities between this pro-
cess and human learning provide a concep-
tual basis for knowledge- based design tools
that improve with use. In addition, some
business analysts forecast that a "redesign
era" will emerge to fuel the next major
semiconductor market, and that equipment
manufacturers will upgrade their products
to take advantage of VLSI technology. 6
By allowing for parameterized generic
design components, VHDL simplifies the
reuse of designs. Once a generic component Figure 2. Organizations involved in systems development.
has been designed, it can be reused by in-
stantiating its parameters with values Effective design process coordination human intellect cannot conceive of and
meeting given application requirements-a can further decrease electronic system finalize designs simultaneously; thus,
feature significantly reducing resources ex- design time and cost by eliminating expen- designs must be partitioned among respon-
pended in complex electronic system devel- sive mistakes resulting from inconsistent or sible organizations as illustrated in Figure 2.
opment. misunderstood design specifications. The Ensuring design conformity with initial sys-
April 1986 13

ULSI ULSI - ~ ~ ~ ~ custom
VLSI
b microprocessor/
LSI
C
, MSI Standard
logic family
components
SSI
Discrete
transistors
I I
1950 1960
Figure 3. Evolving nature of semiconductor market.
tem specifications is extremely difficult. As
system designers acquire increasingly
capable and flexible tools, they will produce
unmanageable quantities of data requiring
more efficient project documentation and
management mechanisms.
By providing many features to assist in
design management and documentation
configuration control, VHDL helps to es-
tablish more structured policies and proce-
dures for developing and procuring elec-
tronic systems. Similar to the specification-
and-body concept in Ada, VHDL allows
designers to define specifications represent-
ing design component interfaces separately
from several associated bodies representing
alternative design component implementa-
tions. Use of the interface and associated
bodies enables VHDL to support configu-
ration management of top-down and bot-
tom-up design methodologies. In addition,
VHDL supports packages; this allows man-
agers to establish common naming conven-
tions, data types, and convenient functions
among designers by encapsulating descrip-
tions within VHDL packages.
VHDL's impact on
industry
The steadily increasing level of integra-
tion has motivated a growing emphasis on
design automation and semicustom/cus-
tom ICs. The continued growth of the
semiconductor industry and the nature of
the IC market strongly depend on the
14
~ ~ Semicustom!
components
Standard
support
components
I I
1970 1980
Time
maturation rate of design automation and
semicustom/custom technology; that
maturation rate depends on factors such as
venture capital, legal copyright protection,
entrepreneurial talent, and (in particular)
standards. Clearly, not everything should
be standardized. However, the lack of ap-
propriate standards to guide and focus the
growth of a technology can foster costly
and burdensome diversity. We will need
design, test, and manufacturing standards
(such as VHDL) to establish interoperabili-
ty and required interfaces.
Open-system design automation archi-
tectures. As the electronic design process
becomes increasingly dependent on auto-
mation tools, firms will develop proprietary
tools to maintain a competitive edge. Many
companies won't depend completely on
closed and inflexible vendor design
automation systems. On the other hand,
most companies cannot attract the expertise
(currently in low supply) or afford the
sizable resources required to develop their
own custom design automation systems.
While existing CAE environments pro-
vide excellent capabilities in specialized
areas, in general they do not contribute to
custom design automation system integra-
tion. The multitude of different, internally
developed vendor formats limits CAE en-
vironment interoperability; the only prac-
tical means of integrating new tools is by file
transfer requiring many interface programs
and resulting in a system suffering from ex-
cessive overhead and long training times.
To accommodate the development of
proprietary design automation tools, future
CAE systems must provide interfaces (such
as VHDL) allowing users to integrate these
systems into theirown custom- designed en-
vironments. Therefore, the next generation
of CAE environments must support an
open-software-system architecture with
well-defined interoperability standards to
ensure effective interfaces for the designer
and his tools:
There is a grass roots movement of
CAE users and hardware developers
pg for open systen . . . As systems
become more program oriented, rather
than graphics oriented, the necessary
common tool interfaces will be easier to
achieve. 7
Vendors can conserve engineering and
sales resources by targeting CAE products
to well-defined market standards. Users
can then buy design automation products
from different vendors without having to
learn several interfaces and input lan-
guages, and can incorporate the different
products into an integrated system meeting
particular organizational needs.
Semicustom or application-specific ICs.
As IC complexity increases, circuits become
more specialized and their broad applicabil-
ity decreases. Burgeoning integration has
affected the general nature of the semicon-
ductor market (Figure 3). Small-scale-
integrated (or SSI) and medium-scale-
integrated (or MSI) circuits formed the bulk
of the "jelly-bean" market, where users
designed specific applications by tailoring
SSI and MSI circuit hardware configura-
tions. Large-scale-integrated (or LSI) and
very-large-scale-integrated (or VLSI) cir-
cuits formed the bulk of the microproces-
sor/support chip market, where users
designed specific applications by tailoring
microprocessor software. Ultimately, the
VLSI and ultralarge-scale ICs will form the
bulk of the semicustom/custom, applica-
tion-specific market. At least 100 com-
panies around the world now provide semi-
custom/custom design services. Dataquest
forecasts a market of $20 billion for semi-
custom and custom ICs by 1990-nearly
half of all predicted IC sales. This forecast
results from the many advantages applica-
tion-specific ICs offer, such as reduced part
count, increased architectural design flex-
ibility, and increased design security.
There are several reasons why a standard
hardware description language like VHDL
is important to semicustom/custom design
services. First, these services require ad-
vanced desigu automation systems with
IEEE DESIGN &TEST
 clearly defined interfaces so that customers
of varying experience and sophistication Knowledge
can shorten development cycles, reduce
costs, and avoid expensive legal proceed-
ings resulting from design specification mis-
understandings between vendor and Maturity _ Device physics
customer: /o / _' Fabrication technollogy
Three issues critical to the custom- /
IC market (which covers full custom, /1 // Applications gaap
standard cells, and gate arrays) need
to be solved and are the driving forces C o1mmercialI I
~ I/~~I .10 Design technology
behind the new relationships: the de- growth
sign interface, true second sourcing,
and high performance fabrication Design tools
processes... because CAD advance-
ments have happened so quickly,
conventional IC manufacturers have Infancy
been unable to catch up with CAD in-
terface technology. 8
Second, a standard hardware description Time
language (1) provides user documentation
of the semicustom/custom design and (2)
facilitates design second sourcing. In a Figure 4. Slow progress on design technology.
semicustom/custom design service, ven-
dors usually cannot supply detailed docu-
mentation such as manuals, books, and Structural
application notes typically associated with representation % Behavioral
standard components because every de- representation
vice is different and may or may not be Processor
vendor designed. Third, a standard hard- memory switch System 1/0 specification
ware description language enables semi- Algorithmic
custom/custom design service vendors to
protect proprietary design system ele- Gate Boolean
expression
ments giving them a competitive advan-
tage.
Cell
*geometrics
VHDL's impact on
universities Pattern
generation data
The science of design. As illustrated in
Figure 4, if we cannot reduce the disparity Geometric
between design and fabrication of elec- representation
tronic systems, our limited ability to con-
ceptualize and correctly design future sys- Figure 5. Gajski-Kuhn "Y" diagram.
tems may restrict our use of IC technology's
tremendous power. Our current under-
standing of design principles and practices tured programming) are motivating hard- vancing electronic system design through
is proving inadequate for dealing with ad- ware engineering and the development of the above stages to form a science of design.
vanced electronic system design complex- hardware description languages (support-
ities. Historically, design has been an art ing structured design). 9 We need to study VHDL and behavioral design. VHDL
rather than a science-acquired rather than the design process further; note the recent serves as a vehicle for investigating new ap-
learned. Starting with sometimes vague and National Science Foundation design theory proaches to design techniques, models, and
incomplete specifications, designers go and methodology program. 10 In fact, if automation in areas such as test, synthesis,
through an iterative series of transforma- one agrees with scientific stages of devel- and simulation. Knowledge about hard-
tions until systems can be built within given opment-case studies isolating points in de- ware properties and characteristics ap-
technologies-or until it is clear that in- sign space, empirical observations of exper- plicable to design is the very essence of lan-
tended functional behavior, performance ience, and understanding that transcends guage constructs comprising VHDL. The
goals, or design constraints are not feasible. empirical observation-1 then current Gajski-Kuhn "Y" diagram, illustrated in
The same complexity that motivated soft- work on decision rule- based systems may Figure 5, views the design process sym-
ware engineering and the development of be said to generate design principles. 12,13 metrically from either a structural or a
higher order languages (supporting struc- VHDL can play an important role in ad- behavioral perspective. 14-15 The structural
April 1986 15
representation denotes the logic design ap-
proach in which typically logic-structural
design describes internal structures im-
plementing desired behavior. Designers
move up the axis to gain more concise and
powerful designs. The register-transfer level
is concerned with registers, adders, arith-
metic logic units, and their connections.
The highest level is system hardware such as
processors, memories, multiplexers, and
systolic arrays. Most design today can be
characterized as basically structural.
VHDL offers a framework for more be-
havior-oriented design, in which the behav-
ioral axis has Boolean expressions at the
lower levels. Algorithms are the next level
up. The highest design level is the system in-
put/output specification. The VHDL proj-
ect has borrowed from Ada technology in
areas of language design, intermediate
form, and support-environment architec-
ture. VHDL and Ada combine to form an
integrated framework wherein the input/
output specification encompasses both
hardware and software aspects of a design.
Behavioral design offers greater advantages
than more common structural design ap-
proaches. In describing how the designer
wants a block to function, behavioral
design is more flexible and efficient for
designers and design automation tools. The
ability to consider electronic system soft-
ware and hardware jointly has tremendous
potential in improving software/hardware
performance trade-off analysis and system
synthesis. 16
I n surveying governmental, industrial,
and academic input, we have illus-
trated electronic system development,
design automation, semicustom design,
and new design engineering techniques
molding the future of electronics and
motivating VHDL's emergence as an im-
portant design standard. How better to
conclude than with Henrik Ibsen's guiding
principle for developing tomorrow's
technology:
I hold that man is in the right who is
most closely in league with the future. WI
Acknowledgments
The VHDL Tri-Service Committee-com-
prised of Bernard Rosen representing the
Army, Harvey Alperin representing the Navy,
and Allen Dewey representing the Air
16
Force-would like to recognize for their 13. H. Shobe, "Al Meets CAD," Proc. IFIP
outstanding professionalism and dedication the Int'l Conf. VLSI, Trondheim, Norway,
people from Intermetrics, IBM, and Texas Aug. 1983.
Instruments who have contributed to the 14. D. Gajski and R. Kuhn, "Guest Editors'
VHDL effort. In addition, the committee
Introduction: New VLSI Tools," IEEE
would like to acknowledge the contribution of Computer, Vol. 16, No. 12, Dec. 1983, pp.
the VHDL program software production 11-14.
manager Richard Wallace. Finally, the
committee would like to give special acknowl- 15. R. Walker and D. Thomas, "A Model of
edgement to the management of the VHSIC Design Representation and Synthesis,"
program-E. D. Maynard, VHSIC program Proc. ACM/IEEE 22nd Design Automa-
director, DoD; William J. Edwards, Air Force tion Conf., Las Vegas, Nev., June 1985,
VHSIC program director; C. G. Thorton, pp. 453-459.
Army VHSIC program director; and Eliot D. 16. L. Hoevel, "Architectural Commonalities
Cohen, Navy VHSIC program director-for in Software and Hardware," 22nd IEEE
their belief in the concept of VHDL and for COMPCON, San Francisco, Calif., Feb.
their continued support. 1981, pp. 874-877.
References
1. A. Dewey, "VHSIC Hardware Descrip-
tion (VHDL) Development Program,"
Proc. 20th Design Automation Conf.,
Miami, Fla., June 1983, pp. 625-628.
2. E.D. Maynard, "VHSIC Database and
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18.
4. C. Patton, "Languages and Data For-
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CAE Design Loop," Electronic Design,
Vol. 32, No. 26, Dec. 27, 1984, pp.
99-114. Allen Dewey received his BS in electrical engi-
5. D. Moldovan, "Computational Models neering from Texas A&M University, his MS in
for VLSI Systems," Report DIM-82-3, electrical engineering from the California In-
Electrical Engineering Department, USC, stitute of Technology, and his MS in computer
Los Angeles, Calif., 1982. science from the University of Dayton. A
United States Air Force captain, he has served
6. R. Lineback, "Ending Fourth Decade, for the last four years
Chip Makers Face Doubt and Upheaval," Service VHDL Committee.chairman the Tri-
as of
Electronics Week, Vol. 58, No. 21, May Dewey is currently working toward his PhD
27, 1985, pp. 50-55. in electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon
7. J. Solomon, "Next Stop For CAE Is University. The VHDL program is now under
Open-System Software; But The Road the purview of Stanley Wagner.
Won't Be Smooth," Electronic Design,
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Chips," Electronic Engineering Times,
Issue 321, Feb. 1985, p. 44.
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1985, p. 14.
10. NSF 1986 Budget Proposal, Nat'l Science
Foundation, Office of Public Affairs, 1800
G Street, Washington, DC 20550; (202)
357-9498.
11. R. Davis, "Expert Systems: Where Are Anthony J. Gadient, a first lieutenant in the
We? And Where Do We Go From Here?," United States Air Force, is technical program
The Al Magazine, Vol. 2, Spring 1982, manager for the Wright-Patterson Air Force
pp.3-22. Base Avionics Laboratory's VHSIC engineer-
12. L. Steinberg and T. Mitchell, "A ing information system. He is presently work-
Knowledge-Based Approach to VLSI ing toward his MBA at Wright State University.
CAD," Proc. ACM/IEEE 21st Design Gadient's current address is AFWAL/AADE-
Automation Conf., Albuquerque, N.M., 3, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio 45433-6543;
June 1984, pp. 412-418. (513) 255-6553.
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