Bluespec-Enabled Team Wins MEMOCODE 2008 Hardware/Software Co-Design Contest

Winning MIT Team Avoids System Simulation and Surpasses Second
Place by 11X
WALTHAM, Mass.--(Business Wire)--
A five-member team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) won the top honors in the second annual hardware/software
co-design contest sponsored by the ACM-IEEE International Conference
on Formal Methods and Models for Co-Design (MEMOCODE 2008).

The winning design was completed using the Bluespec
general-purpose high-level synthesis environment. Though the design
was subdivided across three designers, completed in approximately
three weeks, and the only entry implemented 100% in hardware, the team
debugged the system level design directly on the FPGA platform,
avoiding system simulation while still passing the required testbench
and eight test cases.

With a solution that outperformed second place by an order of
magnitude, Kermin Fleming, Myron King, Man Cheuk Ng, Asif Khan and
Muralidaran Vijayaraghavan from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab were judged overall winners of the design contest by
the MEMOCODE 2008 contest judging panel. 27 teams from commercial
companies and universities started the contest, with eight teams
submitting final design solutions.

"With two wins in a row, we are extremely happy for the MIT team
and proud of our high-level synthesis environment," says Charlie
Hauck, Bluespec's chief executive officer (CEO). "Bluespec's
atomic-transaction level design enables FPGAs to be leveraged for SoC
development in ways previously unimagined, for modeling, software
development and verification at timeframes significantly earlier in
the design cycle. The MIT team was able to show in a dramatic fashion
just how quickly FPGAs can be employed."

The challenge was to sort large databases of encrypted data using
any hardware and software design methodology targeting any field
programmable gate array (FPGA) development platform. Contest
organizers Krste Asanovic of UC Berkeley, James C. Hoe of Carnegie
Mellon University, and Patrick Schaumont of Virginia Tech provided a
software-only starter reference solution for the Xilinx XUP
development board. A description of this year's contest and a summary
of the completed solutions are available here:
http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/memocontest08/. Last year's contest
description and summary of completed solutions are available here:
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/distribution/mc07contest/.

MEMOCODE 2008 gathers researchers and practitioners in the field
of the design of modern hardware and software systems to explore ways
in which future design methods can benefit from new results on formal
methods. It is sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery
(ACM) Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) and Special
Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), IEEE Circuits and Systems
Society (CAS) and IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA).

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. Elevating System-on-Chip (SoC) modeling, verification
and implementation with atomic transactions, the only high-level
abstraction for hardware concurrency, the general purpose toolset
allows ASIC and FPGA teams to reduce development 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 2008 Bluespec Inc. Bluespec and AzureIP are 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.

Bluespec
George Harper, 781-250-2200
Vice President of Marketing
george.harper@bluespec.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008