jenn@laas.laas.fr (Eric Jenn) (03/26/91)
This will probably looks like a dumb question, but ... I'm interested by the VHDL language in the framework of system level simulation. By "system level", I mean tasks scheduling, synchronization and communication between tasks etc... Of course, there are many simulation languages specialized in system level simulation (GPSS, SIMSCRIPT, SES, CADAS etc...), but most of them are unable to model low level (gate or RTL) behaviors easily . Therefore, choosing one of these languages is a choice that limits *** a priori *** the depth (and therefore the accuracy) of our analysis. From this point of vue, VHDL seems to be a good choice IFF it provides the features able to model (more or less easily) the kind of mechanisms we meet in system level simulation. So the real question is : "is VHDL sufficiently powerful to be a hardware description language AND a system level simulation language ?" Any advice or information ? Thanks a lot ... Eric
jukka@tk4.oulu.fi (Jukka A. Lahti) (03/27/91)
In article <5508@laas.laas.fr> jenn@laas.laas.fr (Eric Jenn) writes: > So the real question is : > "is VHDL sufficiently powerful to be a hardware description language AND a > system level simulation language ?" In my experience, it is. It has all the power you need, if you just have the patience to write all that code. We have been using VHDL for high level system modelling for some time, and come to the conclusion that you definitely need a graphical method (with well defined semantics) and tool to generate the VHDL models for you. We have developed some tools that generate behavioural VHDL code from graphical Structured Analysis (SA) data-flow and state-transition diagrams. I think this is the way to go, if you don't want to spend all your time writing port- and component declarations etc. - jukka -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jukka Lahti (jukka@steks.oulu.fi) Phone: +358-81-352756 University of Oulu, Electronics Lab. Telefax: +358-81-561278 SF-90570 Oulu, FINLAND