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IEEE 1076-VHSIC HW Description Language

Hardware Description Language
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Description

VHDL was an offshoot of the VHSIC (Very High-Speed IC) program, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and was first proposed in 1981. Language development was done by Intermetrics Inc, who were language experts, Texas Instruments as chip design experts and IBM as system design experts. The language was based on Ada, an earlier DoD language developed for software.

At the end of the program, in March of 1986, the role of standardizing the language was given to the IEEE who formed the VHDL Analysis and Standardization Group (VASG). It became an IEEE standard in 1987 — IEEE 1076. At that time, military contracts required that VHDL descriptions were delivered for all ASIC designs.

Downloads
http://www.accellera.org/downloads/ieee

Dependent standards:
1076.1 Standard VHDL Analog and Mixed-Signal Extensions ( VHDL-AMS)
1076.1.1 Standard VHDL Analog and Mixed-Signal Extensions – Packages for Multiple Energy Domain Support ( StdPkgs)
1076.2 IEEE Standard VHDL Mathematical Packages (math)
1076.3 Standard VHDL Synthesis Packages (vhdlsynth)
1076.4 Standard VITAL ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Modeling Specification (VITAL) – This group is now part of 1076.
1076.6 Standard for VHDL Register Transfer Level (RTL) Synthesis (SIWG)
1164 Standard Multivalue Logic System for VHDL Model Interoperability (Std_logic_1164) (vhdl-std-logic)

Books
Top-Down Digital VLSI Design: From Architectures to Gate-Level Circuits and FPGAs

HDL with Digital Design: VHDL and Verilog (Engineering Series)