Chapter 4 - Behavioral Descriptions

Section 3 - Signals and Processes

This section is short, but contains important information about the use of signals in the process statement. The issue of concern is to avoid confusion about the difference between how a signal assignment and variable assignment behave in the process statement. Remember a signal assignment, if anything, merely schedules an event to occur on a signal and does not have an immediate effect. When a process is resumed, it executes from top to bottom and no events are processed until after the process is complete. This means, if an event is scheduled on a signal during the execution of a process, that event can be processed after the process has completed at the earliest. Let's examine an example of this behavior. In the following process two events are schedule on signals x and z.
...
signal x,y,z : bit;
...
process (y)
begin
  x<=y;
  z<=not x;
end process;
If the signal y changes then an event will be scheduled on x to make it the same as y. Also, an event is schedule on z to make it the opposite of x. The question is, will the value of z be the opposite of y? Of course, the answer is no, because when the second statement is executed, the event on x has not been processed yet, and the event schedule on z will be the opposite of the value of x before the process begins.

This is pointed out because this is not necessarily the intuitive behavior and because variables operate differently. For example, in

process (y)
variable x,z : bit;
begin
  x:=y;
  z:=not x;
end process;
The value of the variable z would be the opposite of the value of y because the value of the variable x is changed immediately.

The previous section is Behavioral Descriptions - Sequential Statements.
The next section is Behavioral Descriptions - Input and Output.


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