SUAVE: extending VHDL to improve data modeling support

Our aim in the SUAVE (SAVANT and University of Adelaide VHDL Extensions) Project is to improve support for high-level modeling and reuse in VHDL. A number of previous proposals also address these goals. SUAVE extends the language with object-orientation and genericity features and generalizes some existing features. Extending VHDL in this way has the side effect of improving its expressiveness at all abstraction levels. We adapted most of the added features from Ada-95, largely for the same reasons they are included in that language