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

High-Speed, Accurate Modeling

Modelers and architects want the fastest simulations possible. Fast simulations translate into faster turnarounds, more explorations and better information. In short, they enable better decision-making.

Learn more: download brief on modeling complex IP in emulation

But, Software Models Can Run Too Slowly and Scale Poorly

Unfortunately, software models are not always fast enough. Large, complex models can simulate too slowly in software, taking hours, days, even weeks or more to complete. And, when models grow in size, simulation speed can severely degrade – processor-based software scales poorly for many types of models.

What If Your Models Could Run Much Faster?

Many models could run much faster if they were run in parallel on hardware – instead of sequentially in software. Bluespec provides a very high-level modeling language that can be compiled to run on FPGAs. With a fraction of the bugs of other approaches, very high-level language features, and general-purpose capabilities, Bluespec makes FPGAs feasible as a model execution platform.

With Bluespec, you get much faster simulations – and, your models don’t significantly slow down as they scale in size.

Key Benefits

• Orders-of-magnitude faster simulation speeds
• Scalability – simulation platform speeds scale much better with larger models

Example Projects

Bluespec is being used by a leading processor manufacturer to migrate a software-based processor-modeling environment to an FPGA-based one for orders-of-magnitude faster simulations.

Bluespec was used by a large systems vendor to develop a cycle-accurate processor model that successfully booted Linux on an FPGA – with less than a man-year of effort.