Subject: Checking for dimensional consistency in VHDL-AMS models
From: Joe Gwinn (gwinn@ed.ray.com)
Date: Thu Dec 09 1999 - 11:51:54 PST
Some years ago, during the development of the VHDL-AMS standard, there was
a desire to build into the VHDL-AMS language some kind of type-checking
mechanism to detect inconsistent use of dimensions (meters, seconds, m/s,
newtons, amps, etc) in the user-written equations describing the system
being modeled. At the time, dimensional checking was voted down, on the
theory that we didn't know how to do such a thing, and so didn't know how
to write the VHDL-AMS to implement such consistency checking.
The physics community writes very large mathematical models of physics
problems, now using C++, and they had the same desire to find an efficient
yet effective way to catch inconsistent dimensions in equations, to reduce
the difficulty and expense of debugging their simulation code.
Now, years later, the physics community has solved the problem, at least
for C++, and their solution could be a model for a future extension of
VHDL-AMS. The following website, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, is
a good starting point:
http://www.fnal.gov/fermitools/abstracts/siunits/abstract.html
Title: "The SI Library of Unit-Based Computation"
Joe Gwinn
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