I am having a hard time understanding the following syntax in Verilog:
input [15:0] a; // 16-bit input
output [31:0] result; // 32-bit output
assign result = {{16{a[15]}}, {a[15:0]}};
I know the assign statement will wire something up to the result bus using wires and combinational logic, but what's up with the curly braces and 16{a[15]}?
This question is related to
concatenation
verilog
The curly braces mean concatenation, from most significant bit (MSB) on the left down to the least significant bit (LSB) on the right. You are creating a 32-bit bus (result) whose 16 most significant bits consist of 16 copies of bit 15 (the MSB) of the a bus, and whose 16 least significant bits consist of just the a bus (this particular construction is known as sign extension, which is needed e.g. to right-shift a negative number in two's complement form and keep it negative rather than introduce zeros into the MSBits).
There is a tutorial here*, but it doesn't explain too much more than the above paragraph.
For what it's worth, the nested curly braces around a[15:0] are superfluous.
*Beware: the example within the tutorial link contains a typo when demonstrating multiple concatenations - the (2{C}} should be a {2{2}}.
As Matt said, the curly braces are for concatenation. The extra curly braces around 16{a[15]} are the replication operator. They are described in the IEEE Standard for Verilog document (Std 1364-2005), section "5.1.14 Concatenations".
{16{a[15]}}
is the same as
{
a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15],
a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15], a[15]
}
In bit-blasted form,
assign result = {{16{a[15]}}, {a[15:0]}};
is the same as:
assign result[ 0] = a[ 0];
assign result[ 1] = a[ 1];
assign result[ 2] = a[ 2];
assign result[ 3] = a[ 3];
assign result[ 4] = a[ 4];
assign result[ 5] = a[ 5];
assign result[ 6] = a[ 6];
assign result[ 7] = a[ 7];
assign result[ 8] = a[ 8];
assign result[ 9] = a[ 9];
assign result[10] = a[10];
assign result[11] = a[11];
assign result[12] = a[12];
assign result[13] = a[13];
assign result[14] = a[14];
assign result[15] = a[15];
assign result[16] = a[15];
assign result[17] = a[15];
assign result[18] = a[15];
assign result[19] = a[15];
assign result[20] = a[15];
assign result[21] = a[15];
assign result[22] = a[15];
assign result[23] = a[15];
assign result[24] = a[15];
assign result[25] = a[15];
assign result[26] = a[15];
assign result[27] = a[15];
assign result[28] = a[15];
assign result[29] = a[15];
assign result[30] = a[15];
assign result[31] = a[15];
Source: Stackoverflow.com