OOVHDL: object oriented VHDL

In the last decade, VHDL has played an important role in the explosive growth of the electronic design automation industry and, currently, it is widely used by hardware systems designers in many projects. However to keep up with the steady increase in complexity of hardware systems, to allow reuse of design models, and to reduce development time and cost, new design methods must be found. Several documents and publications have proposed to extend VHDL and add object oriented features both to manage the complexity increase and to augment the capabilities and expressiveness of VHDL. The authors describe OOVHDL, which extends VHDL by adding object oriented features such as inheritance, polymorphism mechanism, and communication via messages. The object oriented extensions and the different constructs described in the paper are illustrated through some examples.