Hardware Description Languages:  VHDL and Verilog

A Short Course

Instructor: Wayne Burleson, burleson@ecs.umass.edu
            University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Intended Audience:
	Students and working engineers with some background
in programming and digital design who want to learn about design
using Hardware Description Languages, primarily VHDL and Verilog.

Format: 6 1-hour lectures,   Lots of design examples.
	Visits to Web sites of various HDL tool vendors.

1. Motivations
	Why HDLs?  Modern Digital Design methodologies
	How are HDLs different from programming languages?
	Uses of HDLs: Specification, Simulation, Synthesis
	References: books, articles, Web sites,... 

2. Introduction to VHDL,  Structural VHDL 
	the cruxes of HDLs: time, parallelism and electricity
	data types, operators, control constructs, text and file I/O
	instantiating structures,  parameters, packages, attributes
	Examples: adders, registers, counters, partity checker

3. Behavioral VHDL 
	Concurrent and sequential statements
	Examples: clocking, Finite State Machines, arithmetic, memory

4. Larger VHDL Examples
	Libraries, Mixed mode descriptions
	Examples: Multiplier, DRAM,

5. Verilog: the "other" HDL
	How does it differ from VHDL? syntax, semantics
	Examples: register, factorial, counter, text I/O
	Verilog to VHDL translators

6. Advanced Topics
	Synthesis (technology mapping, FSM example, register example)
	HDL Development Tools (compilers, development, utilities, etc.)
	Case Study: SONET chip set with VHDL
	Conclusions
	Where to go from here?

Web page: http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/vspgroup/burleson/courses/vhdl.html