VHDL Math Tricks of the Trade

Jim Lewis
SynthWorks Design Inc.

Abstract

VHDL is a strongly typed language. Success in VHDL depends on understanding the types and overloaded operators provided by the standard and numeric packages. Unfortunately, most books overlook discussing the numeric types and their overloading. This paper starts by giving a short tutorial on VHDL's numeric types, the strong typing rules, and the overloading of VHDL numeric operators. The paper goes on to show some useful math tricks and considerations when coding arithmetic in VHDL.

References

The following websites have information about the various groups doing work on the VHDL packages used for Math in VHDL.

1. IEEE 1076.3/numeric std: http://www.eda.org/vhdlsynth
2. IEEE 1164: http://www.eda.org/vhdl-std-logic