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Lecture

Introduction to VHDL

In course

EE-334: Digital systems design

Students will acquire basic knowledge about methodologies and tools for the design, optimization, and verification of custom digital systems/hardware. They learn how to design synchronous digital circuits on register transfer level, analyse their timing a ...

Description

This lecture provides an introduction to VHDL, a hardware description language extensively used in industry and academia. It covers the history of VHDL, its key features like entity, architecture, signals, and data types, and the VHDL library system. The lecture also explains the difference between VHDL and programming languages, the use of libraries and packages, entity and architecture declarations, signals, and the std_logic data type.

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Instructor

Andreas Peter Burg

Andreas Burg was born in Munich, Germany, in 1975. He received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in 2000 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. He then joined the Integrated Systems Laboratory of ETH Zurich, from where he graduated with the Dr. sc. techn. degree in 2006. In 1998, he worked at Siemens Semiconductors, San Jose, CA. During his doctoral studies, he was an intern with Bell Labs Wireless Research for a total of one year. From 2006 to 2007, he held positions as postdoctoral researcher at the Integrated Systems Laboratory and at the Communication Theory Group of the ETH Zurich. In 2007 he co-founded Celestrius, an ETH-spinoff in the field of MIMO wireless communication, where he was responsible for the ASIC development as Director for VLSI. In January 2009, he joined ETH Zurich as SNF Assistant Professor and as head of the Signal Processing Circuits and Systems group at the Integrated Systems Laboratory. In January 2011, he became a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he is leading the Telecommunications Circuits Laboratory in the School of Engineering. In June 2018 he was promoted to the role of a Tenured Associate Professor. In 2000, Mr. Burg received the Willi Studer Award and the ETH Medal for his diploma and his diploma thesis, respectively. Mr. Burg was also awarded an ETH Medal for his Ph.D. dissertation in 2006. In 2008, he received a 4-years grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for an SNF Assistant Professorship. In his professional career, Mr. Burg was involved in the development of more than 25 ASICs. He is a member of the IEEE and of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). Research interests and expertise

Circuits and systems for telecommunications (wireless and wired)
Prototyping and silicon implementation of new communication technologies
Development of communication algorithms and optimization for hardware implementation
Low-power VLSI signal processing for communications and other applications
Digital integrated circuits
Circuits for image and video processing

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (30)

VHDL

The VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is a hardware description language (HDL) that can model the behavior and structure of digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from the system level down to that of logic gates, for design entry, documentation, and verification purposes. Since 1987, VHDL has been standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as IEEE Std 1076; the latest version of which is IEEE Std 1076-2019.

Hardware description language

In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, and most commonly, digital logic circuits. A hardware description language enables a precise, formal description of an electronic circuit that allows for the automated analysis and simulation of an electronic circuit.

Boolean data type

In computer science, the Boolean (sometimes shortened to Bool) is a data type that has one of two possible values (usually denoted true and false) which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean condition evaluates to true or false.

Primitive data type

In computer science, primitive data types are a set of basic data types from which all other data types are constructed. Specifically it often refers to the limited set of data representations in use by a particular processor, which all compiled programs must use. Most processors support a similar set of primitive data types, although the specific representations vary. More generally, "primitive data types" may refer to the standard data types built into a programming language (built-in types).

Data type

In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these values as machine types. A data type specification in a program constrains the possible values that an expression, such as a variable or a function call, might take. On literal data, it tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data.

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