DR. ARVIND
Johnson Professor,
Computer Science and Engineering,
The Stata Center, M.I.T.
Bluespec: A New Way of Describing SoC Behavior
ABSTRACT: It is certain that there will be orders of magnitude more hand-held devices and sensors in our environment in future, and these devices will be severely constrained both in power and cost. So there can be a vastly greater variety of chips, each designed to serve specific niche markets with various combinations of feature and function. While traditionally this variety in products has been provided through software programmability, power constraints are forcing a migration to dedicated chips. This vision is counter to the steadily decreasing the number of new chip-starts in industry driven by rising chip development costs. A fundamental shift is needed in the current design flow of systems-on-a-chip to fulfill this demand in a cost-efficient manner.
We will present a method of designing systems that facilitates synthesis of complex SoCs from reusable IP modules. The technical challenge is to provide a method for connecting modules in a parallel setting so that the functionality and the performance of the composite are predictable. Bluespec SystemVerilog which is based on guarded atomic actions provides a robust framework to attack this problem. We will illustrate the power and flexibility of Bluespec via some examples such as OFDM-based wireless protocols (802.11a) and H.264 video codec.
BIO: Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT where in the late eighties his group, in collaboration with Motorola, built the Monsoon dataflow machines and its associated software. In 2000, Arvind started Sandburst which was sold to Broadcom in 2006. In 2003, Arvind co-founded Bluespec Inc., an EDA company to produce a set of tools for high-level synthesis. In 2001, Dr. R. S. Nikhil and Arvind published the book "Implicit parallel programming in pH". Arvind's current research focus is on enabling rapid development of embedded systems. Arvind also manages the CSAIL-Nokia collaboration.
http://www.csg.csail.mit.edu/Users/arvind/
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