Bluespec, Inc.
Bluespec, Inc. is a semiconductor tool design company co-founded by Prof. Arvind of MIT in June 2003. Arvind had previously founded Sandburst in 2000, which specialized in producing chips for 10G-bit Ethernet routers; for this task, Arvind had developed the Bluespec language, a high-level functional hardware description programming language which was essentially Haskell extended to handle chip design and electronic design automation in general.[1] The main designer and implementor of Bluespec was Lennart Augustsson. Bluespec is partially evaluated (to convert the Haskell parts) and compiled to the TRS. The justification behind writing chip designs in Bluespec is that it leads to shorter, more abstract, and verifiable (provably correct) source code, as well as type-checked numeric code. Bluespec, Inc. claims greater than 50% improvements compared to conventional methods of design[citation needed]. It also comes with a SystemVerilog frontend.[2]
Bluespec has two product lines. Primarily for ASIC and FPGA hardware designers and architects, Bluespec is delivering high-level synthesis (ESL logic synthesis) with no compromise (speed and area) RTL. Bluespec is the only ESL synthesis solution for control logic, complex datapaths and algorithms[citation needed]. For SystemC users, Bluespec has delivered high-level ESL Synthesis abstractions to SystemC. Bluespec integrates seamlessly into Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor and Magma flows, including verification, debug and synthesis, without requiring new methodologies or tools.
The first Bluespec workshop was held on August 13, 2007 at MIT.
References
- "A History of Haskell: being lazy with class", Paul Hudak (Yale University), John Hughes (Chalmers University), Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research), Philip Wadler (Edinburgh University), The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) San Diego, California, June 9–10, 2007.