Professor Arvind (right picture) Nirav Dave and Myron King, respectively (right picture) (via MIT)
In the early 1980s, MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Arvind (going by the single name) while faced with designing a new circuit thought, "Why can’t I write this description textually?’”
Elsewhere, two individuals, Phil Moorby and Prabhu Goel had a similar idea. In 1984 the duo released "Verilog," a a system that could be used to model electronic systems at the register-transfer level. The duo made the hardware description language (HDL) Verilog similar to the C programming language to create a familiar set of commands for engineers. HDL is a 'capture language.' The design starts at a very high level, and all the functionality slowly gets added to the overall design. After enough auditing has filtered the design down, automated checkers can run the virtual chip through its paces. After errors are resolved, a gate netlist is created. This is the foundation for a circuit fabrication blueprint. (A photo mask set for ASIC chips, Bitstream for FPGA).
For some perspective, cell-phones are based on ASIC design.
Arvind took the idea of an HDL, from Verilog, to a higher level. Instead of designing circuitry through code, Arvind built a system to designate a set of rules for the chip's operation. The outcome was "BlueSpec." The system can find errors other systems do not detect, find shortcuts, use fewer components, and it can give a 50% efficiency boost over other HDL. Bluespec then converts the results into Verilog code. Bluespec "can guarantee that the resulting chip will actually do what it’s intended to do." Bluespec was set into motion in the mid 1990s - early 2000s. Bluespec Inc was co-founded in 2003 by Arvind.
In a new development, Arvind along with his students Myron King and Nirav Dave expanded the Bluespec instructions with a distinct defining of what can be done only in software from hardware. Ultimately, a new Bluespec annotation scheme allows the designer to compile what is needed for Verilog hardware code from software that is output to C++ code.
Myron King commented about the new Bluespec, "[Bluespec] is a radical departure from the way that most people think about software... But it’s precisely this way of thinking about computation that allows you to generate both hardware and software."
Verilog remains the most popular in the HDL field. Arvind and his team believe that the demand for increasingly efficient chips for mobile devices will make Bluespec an industry design De facto. As my phone crashes daily now, I think that running more extensive testing of the design is more important.
Cabe
Despite my exhaustive research, Professor Arvind's full name remains elusive.
