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Computer Architecture Colloquium |
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Bluespec: Advanced Hardware System Modeling, Rishiyur S. Nikhil, CTO, Bluespec Monday, October 20 • noon - 1pm • MiRC 102A |
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Abstract
In the last few years, several projects in major companies and universities have been adopting BSV (Bluespec SystemVerilog) as their next-generation tool of choice for hardware subsystem design, modeling (for both architecture exploration and early software development), and verification environments. The reason for choosing BSV is its unique combination of:
1. Excellent computation model for expressing complex concurrency and communication, based on atomic transactions and atomic transactional inter-module methods 2. Very high level of abstraction and parameterization (inspired by advanced software languages) 3. Full synthesizability into hardware, enabling execution on FPGAs, obtaining better performance (3 to 4 orders of magnitude) and scalability than software simulation at comparable levels of detail.
In this presentation, I will provide a brief technical overview of BSV (points 1-3 above), and describe several customer projects using BSV. I will also briefly contrast BSV with other approaches to High Level Synthesis (particularly those based on C/C++/SystemC). . About the Speaker
Rishiyur S. Nikhil is co-founder and CTO of Bluespec, Inc., which develops tools that dramatically improve correctness, productivity, reuse and maintainability in the design, modeling and verification of digital designs (ASICs and FPGAs). The core technologies consist of a language, BSV (Bluespec SystemVerilog), which enables very abstract source descriptions based on scalable atomic transactions and extreme parameterization, and tools for high-quality synthesis of BSV into RTL. Earlier, from 2000 to 2003, he led a team inside Sandburst Corp. (later acquired by Broadcom) developing Bluespec technology and contributing to 10Gb/s enterprise network chip models, designs and design tools. From 1991 to 2000 he was at Cambridge Research Laboratory (DEC/Compaq), including one and a half years as Acting Director. From 1984 to 1991 he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. He has led research teams, published widely, and holds several patents in functional programming, dataflow and multithreaded architectures, parallel processing, compiling, and EDA. He is a member of ACM and IFIP WG 2.8 on Functional Programming, and a Senior Member of IEEE. He received his Ph.D. and M.S.E.E. in Computer and Information Sciences from the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and his B.Tech in EE from IIT Kanpur. |