CHAPTER 3 A VHDL Primer: The Essentials Peter R. Wilson This chapter comes from the book Design Recipes for FPGAs by Peter Wilson, ISBN: 9780750668453. Peter's book is designed to be a desktop reference for engineers, students, and researchers who use FPGAs as their hardware platform of choice. The book is produced in the spirit of the "numerical recipe" series of books for various programming languages, where the intention is not to teach the language per se, but rather the philosophy and techniques required to make your application work. The rationale of Peter's book is similar in that the intention is to provide the methods and understanding to make the reader able to develop practical, operational VHDL that will run correctly on FPGAs. Peter's book is divided into five main parts. In the introductory part of the book, primers