The History and Background of Waves

In this chapter, we summarize the history and evolution of WAVES. Our intent here is not to bog down the flow of this text with an inordinately elaborated historical dissertation. Rather, we feel that a notion of the history and development of WAVES will provide useful insight into its application, as we proceed through the remainder of the text. We begin with a brief description of the history of WAVES, concentrating upon the motivation behind its creation and its relationship to VHDL. Next, we overview the concept of integrating WAVES and VHDL for effective design automation practice, highlighting the needs for complexity management and for tool and library support to achieve this effectiveness. Finally, we summarize the use of certain key library components for integrating WAVES and VHDL, setting a conceptual reference for the more detailed technical elaborations of the later chapters. In aggregate, we expect this material to lay the proper foundation for the remainder of our text.