HDL Concepts
Hardware Description Language (HDL)
A specialized language for describing digital circuit structure and behavior, used for simulation and synthesis.
Detailed Explanation
HDLs describe hardware concurrency naturally—unlike software, multiple statements execute simultaneously. The two dominant HDLs are Verilog/SystemVerilog and VHDL. HDL code serves dual purposes: simulation for verification and synthesis for implementation.
HDLs have constructs for combinational logic (continuous assignments, always_comb), sequential logic (always_ff), and behavioral modeling (always blocks with delays for testbenches). Synthesis tools convert synthesizable HDL to gate-level netlists.