A Key Element Toward Concurrent Engineering of Hardware and Software: Binding Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) with Ada 95

This report describes a software interface (or binding) for supporting concurrent development of electronic hardware designed in Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) with software programmed in Ada 95. The purpose of this binding is to provide an initial framework from which future computer aided engineering (CAE) implementors can develop concurrent engineering capability into their work stations. This software binding includes VHDL calls to Ada 95 subprograms and functions using the new VHDL-93 'FOREIGN attribute and providing optional Ada 95 functionality in place of concurrent VHDL process statements to meet Ada 95 language rules expected by future Ada 95 compilers. A binding is also provided for Ada 95 calls to VHDL representations using new Ada 95 programs: Import, Export, and Convention. BNF descriptions were expanded to analyze constraint differences for consistent functionality across languages. Examples show VHDL processes synchronizing with Ada 95 tasks and Ada 95 remote procedure calls across partitions for distributed processing applications.