Bluespec, Inc. is an American

semiconductor device A semiconductor device is an electronic component that relies on the electronic properties of a semiconductor material (primarily silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide, as well as organic semiconductors) for its function. Its conductivit ...

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

company based in

Framingham, Massachusetts Framingham () is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States. Incorporated in 1700, it is located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Middlesex County and the MetroWest subregion of the Greater Boston ...

, and co-founded in June 2003 by

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

s Arvind Mithal, professor of the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), and Joe Stoy of

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

. Arvind had formerly founded Sandburst in 2000, which specialized in producing chips for

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (abbreviated 10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlik ...

(10GE) routers, for this task. Bluespec has two product lines which are primarily for

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficienc ...

(ASIC) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware designers and architects. Bluespec supplies

high-level synthesis High-level synthesis (HLS), sometimes referred to as C synthesis, electronic system-level (ESL) synthesis, algorithmic synthesis, or behavioral synthesis, is an automated design process that takes an abstract behavioral specification of a digital ...

( electronic system-level (ESL)

logic synthesis In computer engineering, logic synthesis is a process by which an abstract specification of desired circuit behavior, typically at register transfer level (RTL), is turned into a design implementation in terms of logic gates, typically by a co ...

) with

register-transfer level In digital circuit design, register-transfer level (RTL) is a design abstraction which models a synchronous digital circuit in terms of the flow of digital signals (data) between hardware registers, and the logical operations performed on th ...

(RTL). The first Bluespec workshop was held on August 13, 2007, at MIT.

Bluespec SystemVerilog

Bluespec

Arvind had developed the Bluespec language named ''Bluespec

SystemVerilog SystemVerilog, standardized as IEEE 1800 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is a hardware description and hardware verification language commonly used to model, design, simulate, test and implement electronic sy ...

'' (BSV), a high-level

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declarat ...

hardware description

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

which was essentially

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell pioneered several programming language ...

extended to handle chip design and

in general. The main designer and implementor of Bluespec was

Lennart Augustsson Lennart Augustsson is a Swedish computer scientist. He was formerly a lecturer at the Computing Science Department at Chalmers University of Technology. His research field is functional programming and implementations of functional programming l ...

. Bluespec is partially evaluated (to convert the Haskell parts) and compiled to the

term rewriting system In mathematics, computer science, and logic, rewriting covers a wide range of methods of replacing subterms of a formula with other terms. Such methods may be achieved by rewriting systems (also known as rewrite systems, rewrite engines, or reduc ...

(TRS). It comes with a

frontend. BSV is compiled to the

Verilog Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits, with the highest level of abstraction being at the re ...

RTL design files.

Tools

BSV releases are shipped with the following hardware development kit: ; BSV compiler : The compiler takes BSV source code as input and generates a hardware description for either Verilog or Bluesim as output. It was opensourced by Bluespec inc. in 2020 under

New BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD licen ...

terms. ; Libraries : BSV is shipped with a set programming idioms and hardware structures ;

modules : Several primitive BSV elements, such as first in, first out (FIFOs) and

processor register A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-onl ...

s, are expressed as Verilog primitives. ; Bluesim : A cycle simulator for BSV designs. ; Bluetcl : A collection of

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company ** TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

extensions, scripts, and packages to link into a Bluespec design.

References

* *

External links

*
Bluespec: User guide
Equipment semiconductor companies Companies established in 2003 Companies based in Framingham, Massachusetts Proprietary software 2000 software Programming languages created in 2000 Statically typed programming languages Haskell programming language family Haskell software {{Prog-lang-stub