A typical digital design flow is as follows:
- Specification
- Architecture
- RTL Coding
- RTL Verification
- Synthesis
- Backend
- Tape Out to Foundry to get end product..a wafer with repeated number of identical Ics.
All modern digital designs start with a designer writing a hardware description of the IC (using HDL or Hardware Description Language) in Verilog/VHDL. A Verilog or VHDL program essentially describes the hardware (logic gates, Flip-Flops, counters etc) and the interconnect of the circuit blocks and the functionality. Various CAD tools are available to synthesize a circuit based on the HDL.
Without going into details, we can say that the VHDL, can be called as the "C" of the VLSI industry. VHDL stands for "VHSIC Hardware Definition Language", where VHSIC stands for "Very High Speed Integrated Circuit". This languages is used to design the circuits at a high-level, in two ways. It can either be a behavioral description, which describes what the circuit is supposed to do, or a structural description, which describes what the circuit is made of. There are other languages for describing circuits, such as Verilog, which work in a similar fashion.
Both forms of description are then used to generate a very low-level description that actually spells out how all these are to be fabricated on the silicon chips. This will result in the manufacture of the intended IC.
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