BLUESPEC ENGINEERING TEAM SWITCHES TO ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

– Software Quality Assurance to be Handled by 100-Person Team in India –

Waltham, Mass. – April 1, 2006– Bluespec Inc., developer of the only ESL synthesis toolset for control logic and complex datapaths in chip design, announced today that it has abandoned high-level software languages for its internal development of tools and has switched, instead, to assembly language.

This change in operational emphasis will enable engineering to focus squarely on verification instead of spending more time fooling themselves that architecture and design are first-order factors to overall performance and quality.

“Since the largest percentage of project resources is spent on software quality assurance (SQA), the team concluded that they weren’t impacting the software development process by designing with so-called high-level languages,” says Sathyam Pattanam, Bluespec’s vice president of engineering. “The team just kept saying: we’ve got a verification problem, not a design problem, so where’s the value?”

Adds Shiv Tasker, chief executive officer of Bluespec: “Strategically, this is a sound decision. We get tremendous savings with offshore SQA engineers. Brilliant!”

Part of the decision resulted from concerns about co-workers. “I totally saw the value in high-level languages, but I never thought that my co-workers would ‘get it’,” remarks Jeff Newbern, principal engineer at Bluespec.

This sentiment was shared throughout the team.

Of course, a strong sense of division of labor led to a concern about dealing with bugs, a verification task. Principal Engineer Ed Czeck notes: “We’ve found that strong typing only leads to one thing: type errors.”

Comments Rishiyur S. Nikhil, founder and chief technology officer of Bluespec: “I’m really enjoying spending 110% of my time on PERL scripts to enhance the new development environment. It beats thinking about technology strategy and the architecture of our toolset.”

“I’ve longed for the days of the 8086,” enthuses Elliot Mednick, principal engineer at Bluespec. “You are not a true engineer unless you can use overlays. I have always believed that you have to have complete control over argument passing, the stack protocol, and register assignment.”

Joe Stoy, famous computer scientist, Bluespec founder and principal engineer expresses relief: “I’m relieved. To be honest, my long history advocating high-level languages and formal methods was solely a cynical gambit to obtain academic tenure when I was at Oxford. We can write assembly language, a common language we all share from training in school, as fast as any other language –– the design time is exactly the same. Anyone can see that it’s SQA’s job to get more productive –– they’re the bottleneck!”

April Fools!

About Bluespec
Bluespec, Inc. manufactures an industry standards-based Electronic Design Automation (EDA) toolset that significantly raises the level of abstraction for hardware design while retaining the ability to automatically synthesize high quality RTL, without compromising speed, power or area. The toolset, the only one focused on control and complex datapaths, allows ASIC and FPGA designers to significantly 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 2006 Bluespec, Inc. Bluespec is a trademark 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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