As integrated circuits have allowed for more complex digital systems, designing at the gate and flip-flop level has become tedious and time consuming. Hardware description languages allow designers to model digital systems at a higher level of abstraction before converting them to lower levels for implementation, making the design process more efficient. The two most popular hardware description languages are VHDL and Verilog, with VHDL being an acronym for very high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language that uses a textual format to describe and simulate hardware designs, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous timing models through elements like components, functions, procedures, and packages.

1. As integrated circuit technology has improved to allow more and more
components on a chip, digital systems have continued to grow in complexity.
As digital systems have become more complex, detailed design of the systems
at the gate and flip-flop level has become very tedious and time consuming. For
this reason, use of hardware languages in the digital design process continues
to grow importance. A hardware description language allows a digital system to
be designed and debugged at a higher level before conversion to the gate and
flip flop level. Use of synthesis computer aided design tools to do this
conversion is becoming more widespread. This is analogous to writing software
programs in high-level languages such as C and then using a compiler to
convert the programs to machine language. The two most popular hardware
description languages are VHDL and Verilog.
VHDL is an acronym for very high-speed integrated circuit hardware
description language. . VHDL model is a textual description of a hardware
design or a piece of design that, when simulated mimics the design behavior.
. The language can be used as an exchange medium between chip vender and
CAD tool users. Different chip venders can provide VHDL description of their
components to system designers. CAD tool users can use it to capture the
behavior of the design at a high level of abstraction for functional simulation. It
supports both synchronous and asynchronous timing models. . The language
has element that make large-scale modeling easier, for example component,
functions, procedure, and packages.