Potential Impact of VHDL on Dependable Distributed System Design

摘要

The goal of dependable systems and components is to provide proper service in thepresence of faults. One design approach is to develop extremely dependable building blocks, using fault avoidance techniques to decrease generic or design faults. Then, the reliable system components are combined using fault tolerance to create a dependable distributed system. The adoption and implementation of a standard hardware description language in VHDL (VHSIC hardware description language) promotes the use of fault avoidance techniques throughout the system design cycle. Descriptive languages such as VHDL also provide a basis for tools which can aid in the specification, design, and validation of both dependable systems and their component building blocks. However, integration of VHDL and existing high-level system evaluation tools remains a research problem. (Author)