bit shift and extract

Hi again,

Well, I think I see your point - especially at the decomposition of the number. I really appreciate your recommendation of literature. Actually some months ago I was looking for a book. I did not find anything usefull and I ended up with rather a bunch of tutorials. Now, I'm already (very) short on time and reading an 850 pages book for having a simple hex display run by the weekend does not seem to be very realistic. I'll keep the book marked, though.

Can it be that it makes a bit of a difference in the approach, coming from software or from hardware? E.g. for me, coming from software, what you say sound like I should first develop a statemachine for my software. Then translate it into hardware circuits / elements / digital logic and then translate the circuits finally into VHDL. Clearly from what I saw, people coming from hardware are taking this approach, starting in the forelast step: the circuits which to them is more intuitive, and then simply convert them into VHDL.

Do I really have to go the way through the hardware circuits here? So far it sounds to me like rather: Forget the number decomposition! Take the std_logic_vector input from the AVALON interface directly. At most buffer it somewhere. Cut out the bits you need (switch/case) and print them hex (switch/case). That's it. It's much easier, it's not a state machine at all, and it absolutely does not require any gatelevel logic?! Am I doing wrong? It would go towards the answer of Cris72 even. You mentioned it was not "standard VHDL" - so, could you tell me please, at least in words, what would be the standard way for it? How then a style-correct implementation (probably, even shorter than 3 lines) would look like? If it was longer, what was the gain or what is the risk in writing the above three lines? Could you give me an example? Input would be std_logic_vector, output needs to be an extracted number.