Computer Science

Colloquium Details

BluespecTM : A language for hardware design, simulation and synthesis

Abstract

Design of complex chips, such as microprocessors, often consists of high-level architectural exploration followed by detailed RTL coding. These are usually done in different languages (C/C++/SystemC for the former and Verilog for the latter, for example), mainly because there is no smooth continuum between the two kinds of languages. As a result, the architect essentially tosses the final design over the fence to the RTL coder, and this design flow results in less architectural exploration and premature freezing of designs. The Bluespec language together with its compiler alleviates this problem because it is suitable for both modeling and RTL generation. Furthermore, the Bluespec compiler can generate both structural RTL and C, such that they are cycle accurate with respect to each other.

The core innovation in Bluespec is the use of Term Rewriting Systems for hardware description and synthesis, an approach first explored by James Hoe and myself at MIT. At Sandburst, the language has been designed and implemented by Lennart Augustsson to exploit the powerful type system and abstraction mechanisms of the declarative programming language Haskell. (Sandburst is a new fab-less semiconductor company, building 10Gb/s packet processing and switching fabric chip set for MAN and Data Center routers; see www.sandburst.com.) The clean semantics of Bluespec also facilitates formal verification and systematic stepwise refinement via program transformation. Sandburst has recently made the language publicly available (www.bluespec.org). In this talk I will outline how and why Bluespec improves the chip design process by giving examples from microprocessor and other complex chips. We will also describe how Bluespec facilitates hierarchical design.

This is joint work with the Bluespec group at Sandburst.

Biography

Arvind is the Johnson Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Engineering. As the Founder and President of Sandburst, Arvind led the Company from its inception in June 2000 until his return to MIT in August 2002. His work at MIT on high-level specification and description of architectures and protocols using Term Rewriting Systems (TRSs), encompassing hardware synthesis as well as verification, laid the foundations for Sandburst. Previously, he contributed to the development of dynamic dataflow architectures, the implicitly parallel programming languages Id and pH, and compilation of these languages on parallel machines. Arvind is an IEEE Fellow and was awarded the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award in 1994. He has received the Distinguished Alumni Awards from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and the University of Minnesota.