Bluespec
Bluespec, Inc. is a semiconductor tool design company co-founded by Professor 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,
Bluespec has two product lines. Primarily for ASIC and FPGA hardware designers and architects, Bluespec supplies high-level synthesis (ESL logic synthesis) with RTL. The first Bluespec workshop was held on August 13, 2007, at MIT.[1]
Bluespec SystemVerilog
Bluespec
Family | Verilog, Haskell |
---|---|
Developer | Bluespec Inc. |
Stable release | Version 2022.01
/ January 2022[2] |
Scope | HDL |
Filename extensions | .bsv |
Website | bluespec |
Major implementations | |
Bluespec Compiler (BSC); Toy Bluespec Compiler | |
Dialects | |
SystemVerilog (BSV), Haskell (BH, or "Bluespec Classic") |
Arvind had developed the Bluespec language called Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV), a high-level functional hardware description programming language which was essentially Haskell extended to handle chip design and electronic design automation in general.[3] The main designer and implementor of Bluespec was Lennart Augustsson. Bluespec is partially evaluated (to convert the Haskell parts) and compiled to the term rewriting system (TRS). It comes with a SystemVerilog frontend.[4] BSV is compiled to the Verilog RTL design files.
Tools
BSV releases are shipped with the following hardware development kit:[5]: 7
- 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 terms.
- Libraries
- BSV is shipped with a set programming idioms and hardware structures
- Verilog modules
- Several primitive BSV elements, such as FIFOs and registers, are expressed as Verilog primitives.
- Bluesim
- A cycle simulator for BSV designs.
- Bluetcl
- A collection of Tcl extensions, scripts, and packages to link into a Bluespec design.
References
- "The First Bluespec Workshop". csg.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
- Bluespec Compiler: README.md, B-Lang, 2022-11-04, retrieved 2022-11-15
- "[it] is basically Haskell with some extra syntactic constructs for the term rewriting system (TRS) that describes what the hardware does. The type system has been extended with types of numeric kind." pg 43 of Hudak, Jones, et al. 2007
- Hudak, Jones, et al. 2007
- Bluespec SystemVerilog User Guide, Bluespec inc., November 24, 2008
- "A History of Haskell: being lazy with class", Paul Hudak (Yale University), John Hughes (Chalmers University), Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research), Philip Wadler (University of Edinburgh), The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) San Diego, California, June 9–10, 2007.
External links
- Bluespec homepage
- Bluespec: User guide
- An open-source Bluespec compiler from University of Cambridge