Abstract
This chapter presents an analogy between structural and object-oriented properties with the intention of showing a migration path for the introduction of software methodology object-orientation in the hardware design process.
First, VHDL structural description capabilities and object-oriented principles are explained. Afterwards, structural VHDL is analyzed under the aspect of object-oriented description methods. It is shown how a configuration can support “static” polymorphism. Incremental development and implementation as included in inheritance mechanisms can be modeled with structural statements. However some overhead is required.
Thus, an inheritance mechanism, already known from real-time object-oriented modeling and similar to ADA tagged types, is proposed for VHDL entity, architecture and component declarations. Application examples and an outlook on genericity conclude the chapter.
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Ecker, W., Preis, V., Schneider, C. (1996). Object Orientation and Structural Design. In: Bergé, JM., Levia, O., Rouillard, J. (eds) Object-Oriented Modeling. Current Issues in Electronic Modeling, vol 7. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1349-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1349-6_5
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