Conclusion
Languages for integrated circuit design

It's clear that a modern circuit description language like VHDL, despite being the recognized standard worldwide and especially in Europe, and benefiting from numerous commercialized user environments, still doesn't incorporate a significant number of the concepts found in some older languages. Registers, clocks, finite state machines, communication and synchronization mechanisms, objects, private types - all these proven concepts are on the list of improvements to be made in a future version of VHDL. Other principles, such as the construction of continuous models, have been the subject of a new standard built on VHDL: VHDL-AMS.

But system-level modeling, which is a key concern in Europe, won't just come from VHDL extensions. This language is already very complex, and there is a limit to how much more complexity users and vendors of CAD tools are likely to accept. Design environments will...