Extensions to VHDL for Abstraction of Concurrency and Communication

This paper describes extensions to VHDL to support system-level behavioral modeling by providing more abstract forms of communication and concurrency than those currently in the language. The report summarizes design objectives and issues that must be considered in developing such extensions, and presents definitions of our extensions. The extensions for communication consist of channel types, channel objects, dynamically allocated channels, and message passing statements. The extensions for concurrency consist of process declarations and static and dynamic process instantiation statements. Use of the extensions is illustrated with examples.