The style of your initial VHDL description has a major effect on the characteristics of the resulting gate-level design synthesized by Foundation Express. The organization and style of a VHDL description determines the basic architecture of your design. Because Foundation Express automates most of the logic-level decisions required in your design, you can concentrate on architectural tradeoffs.
By using Foundation Express, you can make some of the necessary high-level architectural decisions. Certain VHDL constructs are well suited for synthesis. This chapter presents the necessary concepts to make the architectural decisions and use the constructs best suited for synthesis. These concepts are explained in the following sections of this chapter.
