Reuse through genericity in SUAVE

VHDL currently has a limited form of genericity in which component and entity declarations can be parameterized with formal generic constants. SUAVE extends the genericity mechanism by allowing formal generics types and by allowing generics to be specified in the interfaces of subprograms and packages. The approach is based on the features of Ada-95. It allows units to be re-used in a much wider variety of contexts without modifying the original code. We show that the genericity added by SUAVE enhances reuse across the spectrum of modeling, from high-level to gate level. In particular, the genericity extensions interact with the SUAVE extensions for object-oriented data modeling to significantly improve support for high-level behavioral modeling and for developing test-benches. We show that the genericity extensions integrate seamlessly with the existing language. Furthermore, the implementation burden is not large, and since generic instantiation is performed at elaboration time, there is no performance penalty in simulation or synthesis.