Experience with the VHDL environment

The authors present their work in the use of the VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Development Language) environment on three different models of DEC VAX (1, 4, and 5.8 Mips (million instruction per second)). The work included the development of a number of VHDL models and sequences of input stimuli and the gathering of performance data from their execution. Even though the set of benchmarks is not in any way exhaustive, they represent typical applications, making it possible to derive performance models for predicting both time and memory requirements for VHDL modeling and simulation. It is shown that the performances of the VHDL environment on the three computers correlate perfectly with their Mips figures; thus the performance models developed can be normalized to a 1-Mips VAX machine.<>