The System Designer's Guide to Vhdl-Ams: Analog, Mixed-Signal, and Mixed-Technology Modeling

The demand is exploding for complete, integrated systems that sense, process, manipulate, and control complex entities such as sound, images, text, motion, and environmental conditions. These systems, from hand-held devices to automotive sub-systems to aerospace vehicles, employ electronics to manage and adapt to a world that is, predominantly, neither digital nor electronic.

To respond to this design challenge, the industry has developed and standardized VHDL-AMS, a unified design language for modeling digital, analog, mixed-signal, and mixed-technology systems. VHDL-AMS extends VHDL to bring the successful HDL modeling methodology of digital electronic systems design to these new design disciplines.

Gregory Peterson and Darrell Teegarden join best-selling author Peter Ashenden in teaching designers how to use VHDL-AMS to model these complex systems. This comprehensive tutorial and reference provides detailed descriptions of both the syntax and semantics of the language and of successful modeling techniques. It assumes no previous knowledge of VHDL, but instead teaches VHDL and VHDL-AMS in an integrated fashion, just as it would be used by designers of these complex, integrated systems.

• Explores the design of an electric-powered, unmanned aerial vehicle system (UAV) in five separate case studies to illustrate mixed-signal, mixed-technology, power systems, communication systems, and full system modeling.

Peter J. Ashenden received his B.Sc.(Hons) and Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He was previously a senior lecturer in computer science and is now a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. His research interests are computer organization and electronic design automation. Dr. Ashenden is also an independent consultant specializing in electronic design automation (EDA). He is actively involved in IEEE working groups developing VHDL standards, is the author of The Designer's Guide to VHDL and The Student's Guide to VHDL and co-editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series, Systems on Silicon. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.

Gregory D. Peterson is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tennessee. Previously, he was the chief technical officer at FTL Systems, a VHDL-AMS tool vendor, as well as a captain at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Dr. Peterson was the program manager for the VHDL-AMS language reference manual development contract, a participant in the VHDL-AMS standardization activities, and chair of the Accellera Users' Group targeting VHDL-AMS and related HDL technologies. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.

Darrell A. Teegarden has over fifteen years of experience in development of HDL-based models and software tools. His work includes contributions using the MAST(r) modeling language as well as development of VHDL-AMS models and simulation tools. He was principal investigator for a DARPA funded VHDL-AMS project (composite CAD program, focused at MEMS design and analysis). He currently manages VHDL-AMS related tool development for board and system analysis at Mentor Graphics Corporation in Wilsonville, Oregon. Darrell is an IEEE member and holds a B.S., Chemical Engineering from Oregon State University and an M.S., Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.