Hardwwwired: Using the web as Repository of VHDL Components

Abstract

The rapid technological development of the last thirty years has provided means for the design and fabrication of complex digital systems [Mich92]. Systems that in the past took several months and people to be designed can nowadays be made in a few weeks by a single person. These improvements in design and fabrication of digital systems were mostly due to development of design methodologies and CAD tools for automated design. An important support in the design of digital systems is the reusability of components, i.e. to design new components from existing ones. The main benefit of this feature is quite clear as it reduces enormously the design time by not requiring from designers to create basic and generic components every time they start a new project. As digital systems become more and more complex, reusable components play an essential role. Of course, reusable components would not bring so many benefits if there was not any common place to store them so that people could easily share these components, this is why repositories of reusable components are also important. However, one major problem in creating reusable components and so these repositories is that the design process usually requires the use of several CAD tools which accept different description languages and therefore make harder the components reusability.