Question about generics in VHDL

Hello everyone, I am currently in the middle of a VHDL project in my university and iw anted to ask a few questions on some ideas i have in ways to improve my design. The design is a generic type of decoder (in this case, 7/4 and 15/11 are included in the errorcorrection parts fo the program)

The program i have looks like this(and it works fine in both functions, 7/4 and 15/11):



My question is: Is there a way to be able to change the generic values from a pin assigned in my entity section? i intend to use the pin named "func" for that purpose. for example, when "func" is 1 then IPbits = 7 and OPbits = 4 and when "func" =0 then IPbits = 15 and OP bits = 11.

I am wondering if its possible to achieve this sort of function from within vhdl.

Thanks alot for your time

No, you cannot change generic values in real time. That would be like changing the number of pins on a chip while the chip is running.

Generics are for initial set up purposes.

TrickyDicky said:

No, you cannot change generic values in real time. That would be like changing the number of pins on a chip while the chip is running.

Generics are for initial set up purposes.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the quick reply TrickyDicky, is there any other way of making this happen? maybe use a type of variable (if possible) to replace the generics? My VHDL knowledge is fairly limited as i have only started to study it 3 months ago and im wondering if there is any way to implement this.

First comment, you need to learn how to post code at ebaboard. It's really annoying to read it as a blurred screen shot....

Secondly, please consider on your own what you want to achieve hardware-wise.

There are cases where a common logic design is used for product variants with different functionality, controlled by a configuration pin. You either need to implement both logic functions separately and have multiplexers switching between both. Or if one is a superset of the other, implement the larger function and disable part of it conditionally, possibly switching some functional details.