Thierry Bauchon, R&D Director, Home Entertainment Group, STMicroelectronics

Architecture is one of the most important aspects of chip design. It makes the biggest impact on area, power, performance, and timing. It is critical for delivering the best platform for software development. And, because it is a first-order influence on all of these dimensions, architecture can make or break schedules.

But, There Has Been No Way to Explore Architectures Efficiently

While everyone would agree that it is critical to be able to create, assess and explore architectures quickly, existing approaches make this too difficult:

With no way to refine architecture models into implementations, projects have to staff, support, and coordinate two separate designs and environments. This is a major investment that few projects can afford.

RTL-based implementation approaches are too brittle, making it difficult to make small micro-architecture changes and all but impossible to make architecture ones. Too often, projects are stuck with their initial architecture because it is so hard to change. And, this is well before the implications of their choices can be properly assessed.

What If You Could Quickly Explore Architectures?

Bluespec provides a single environment for architecture, verification and implementation. With a powerful, general purpose, high-level language and synthesis into RTL, Bluespec enables rapid creation, assessment and exploration of architectures – and, it provides a single environment where an architectural model can be refined into a high-quality implementation.

Unlike other modeling approaches, Bluespec lets the designer express the architecture directly – which gives the designer 100% control, eliminates surprises, and ensures the best quality, without any added weight of implementation.

Key Benefits

• Bluespec eliminates the need to maintain two separate environments. Bluespec provides a single environment for modeling, verification and implementation. Models can be refined into implementations – and can use a common verification infrastructure throughout.
• Bluespec allows architectural and micro-architectural changes faster and with much lower risk. Optimal area, power, performance and timing depend on finding the best architecture – with Bluespec, this becomes feasible even late in a project.
• Bluespec’s high-level synthesis enables architectures to be assessed quickly on FPGAs or emulation platforms. Feedback is delivered much faster – and design iterations dramatically increase.
• With Bluespec, you express architecture directly, which provides designers with the best control over and intuition about their results.

Example Projects

With Bluespec, a wireless equipment manufacturer was able to explore seven different architectures in a week to determine the lowest-power implementation.

With Bluespec, a mobile graphics controller design was re-targeted from 100 MHz to 200 MHz in three days.

With Bluespec, a cache controller design was re-architected to reduce area by 40%, requiring less than eight hours to make the changes and pass regression.