Inheritance concept for signals in object-oriented extensions to VHDL

Several proposals were made in the last few years to extend the hardware description language VHDL and to add mechanisms like inheritance from the object oriented domain to the language. This paper illuminates the principle problems arising when an inheritance concept for data types is added to VHDL. Solutions to these problems are proposed with an example of an inheritance mechanism for signals within an object-oriented extension to VHDL.