VHDL guidance for safe and certifiable FPGA design

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming increasingly popular for use within high integrity and safety critical systems. One commonly used coding language for their configuration is the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL). Whilst VHDL is used for hardware description, it is developed in a similar way to traditional software, and many safety critical software certification standards require the use of coding subsets and style guidance in order to ensure known language vulnerabilities are avoided. At present there is no recognized, public domain guidance for VHDL. This paper draws together many different sources to provide a starting discussion for a VHDL subset.