VHDL for Avionics: Writing DO-254 Code Without Falling into the Traps
Why “different” VHDL? In avionics, VHDL code doesn’t need to be elegant: it needs to be predictable, verifiable and defensible in front of an auditor. Under DO-254 (ED-80) and AMC 20-152A, the authority expects you to show that the hardware does exactly what the requirements say, and nothing more. In practice, most certification headaches I’ve seen don’t come from a badly designed algorithm. They come from coding details: a latch inferred by an incomplete combinational process, an asynchronous reset released at the wrong moment, a signal crossing two clock domains through…
