What is OOPS in System Verilog?

Unlike procedural programming, here in the OOP programming model programs are organized around objects and data rather than actions and logic. Objects represent some concepts or things and like any other objects in the real Objects in programming language have certain behavior, properties, type, and identity. In OOP based language the principal aim is to find out the objects to manipulate and their relation between each other. OOP offers greater flexibility and compatibility then procedural language like verilog.

Objects are key to understanding object-oriented technology. Look around right now and you’ll find many examples of real-world objects: your system, your desk, your chair.

Real-world objects share two characteristics: They all have state and behavior. System have state (name, color) and behavior (playing music,switch off). Identifying the state and behavior for real-world objects is a great way to begin thinking in terms of object-oriented programming.

SystemVerilog is a object oriented programming and to understand the functionality of OOP in SystemVerilog, we first need to understand several fundamentals related to objects. These include class, method, inheritance, encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism etc.

Class

The class definition describes all the properties, behavior, and identity of objects present within that class.It is the central point of OOP and that contains data and codes with behavior. In SystemVerilog OOPS , everything happens within class and it describes a set of objects with common behavior.

Object

Objects are the basic unit of object orientation with behavior, identity. As we mentioned above, these are part of a class but are not the same. An object is expressed by the variable and methods within the objects. Again these variables and methods are distinguished from each other as instant variables, instant methods and class variable and class methods.

Methods

We know that a class can define both attributes and behaviors. Again attributes are defined by variables and behaviors are represented by methods. In other words, methods define the abilities of an object.

Inheritance

In object oriented programming classes can inherit some common behavior and state from others. Inheritance in OOP allows to define a general class and later to organize some other classes simply adding some details with the old class definition. This saves work as the special class inherits all the properties of the old general class and as a programmer you only require the new features. This helps in a better data analysis, accurate coding and reduces development time. In Verilog , to write a new definition using the existing  definition is done inserting `ifdef compilation controls into the existing code.This is the mechanism of organizing and structuring program. Though objects are distinguished from each other by some additional features but there are objects that share certain things common

Abstraction

The process of abstraction in SystemVerilog is used to hide certain details and only show the essential features of the object. In other words, it deals with the outside view of an object.

Encapsulation

This is an important programming concept that assists in separating an object’s state from its behavior. This helps in hiding an object’s data describing its state from any further modification by external component. In SystemVerilog there are three different terms used for hiding data constructs and these are public, private and protected . As we know an object can associated with data with predefined classes and in any application an object can know about the data it needs to know about. So any unnecessary data are not required by an object can be hidden by this process. It can also be termed as information hiding that prohibits outsiders in seeing the inside of an object in which abstraction is implemented.

Polymorphism

It describes the ability of the object in belonging to different types with specific behavior of each type. So by using this, one object can be treated like another and in this way it can create and define multiple level of interface. Here the programmers need not have to know the exact type of object in advance and this is being implemented at runtime.