BLUESPEC ACHIEVES INDUSTRY BREAKTHROUGH: LANGUAGE INDEPENDENT EQUIVALENCY CHECKING

– Discongruity Identifying Formal Framework Delivers Groundbreaking Capabilities with Rapid Results –

Waltham, Mass. – April 1, 2007 – Bluespec™ Inc. today set a new direction for chip design with technology enabling language independent equivalency checking. Bluespec’s new product line can formally check the equivalence of any two designs, as well as clearly specify any differences, completely regardless of language syntax and semantics.

Tightly packaged in a simple, command-line directive, the toolset compares two designs, guarantees when they are identical, and highlights differences with clarifying line numbers when they are not. Two capabilities make this toolset unique and revolutionary: language independence and processing speed. The toolset may be run on any two design files, regardless of language such as SystemC, SystemVerilog, Verilog, VHDL, or netlists. Despite this, the tool completes within seconds, almost instantaneously identifying to the user whether the designs are exactly the same or not. This performance is orders of magnitude faster than currently available alternatives.

“I’m so excited about this technology that I’ve got most of my engineering team actively designing new, pre-canned examples to illustrate its benefits,” remarks Charlie Hauck, Bluespec’s vice president of engineering. “This is the latest in sequential equivalency checking – this technology checks the design one-line-at-a-time.”

Technology

Harkening, figuratively and literally, back to the great accomplishments of Bell Labs in the 1970s, this technology has been used internally for years. It has four elemental attributes:
    Discongruity – although the core algorithms, such as string comparisons, Levenshtein distance and longest common subsequences (LCS), are individually quite old, the novelty is their integration to find incongruities or differences between two designs for the purpose of equivalency checking.
    Identifying – considerable effort was made in human factors to ensure that the tool was easy to invoke and that the output was quickly understandable and identified to the designer.
    Formal – to ensure integrity, the equivalency checker deploys internal theorem provers. New is the absence of any notion of semantics, which directly supports the language independence capabilities.
    Framework – the technology is designed as a general framework, to support multiple application domains.

Exciting Roadmap
Extensive research is actively under way to identify other markets that might benefit in utilizing the fundamental technology behind Bluespec’s language independent equivalency checking. “Although several more years of testing are required, we believe that other markets like software might possibly be able to leverage this technology – perhaps for identifying changes in source code or for marking up technical specifications,” said Douglas McIlroy, principal engineer at Bluespec. “We expect this tool to drive a whole new ECO-system of products.”

Also under development is a new technology and methodology for fixing designs based on Bluespec’s equivalence checking tools named: Precision Asymmetric Text Correction Heuristic. When perfected, this new capability will allow ECOs to be easily made by applying the design difference output automatically and directly to the files.

Availability
Bluespec’s Discongruity Identifying Formal Framework is available today only on UNIX and Linux platforms. A highly portable application written in C, Bluespec expects to announce additional platform support shortly, with initial targets being Windows, Symbian OS, and PalmOS, in that order.

Pricing starts at $975,000 for annual, time-based licenses.

Simple Tool Invocation
Another distinguishing feature of the tool is the limited learning curve, requiring only minutes to master. The following is an example of the simplicity of invoking the tool to compare two SystemC designs, dma and dma2:

     > diff dma.hpp dma2.hpp

For more details or a clarification of what April Fools is, please contact George Harper, Bluespec’s vice president of marketing, who can be reached at (781) 250-2200 or via email at george.harper@bluespec.com.

About Bluespec
Bluespec Inc. manufactures industry standards-based Electronic Design Automation (EDA) toolsets that significantly raise the level of abstraction for hardware design while retaining the ability to automatically synthesize high-quality RTL, without compromising speed, power or area. The toolsets, including the only ESL synthesis tools focused on control and complex datapaths, allow ASIC and FPGA designers to reduce design time, bugs and re-spins that contribute to product delays and escalating costs. More information can be found on www.bluespec.com or by calling (781) 250-2200.

Copyright 2007 Bluespec, Inc. Bluespec is a trademarks of Bluespec, Inc. All other brands, products, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.

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