Editor's Note: Well, you can only imagine my surprise to receive an email from those clever chaps and chappesses at Bluespec in which they tell me that they have just introduced the world's highest capacity emulation platform, the Latency-Insensitive Emulator (L.I.E.), supporting over 45 billion ASIC-equivalent gates. The rest of their message was as follows...

Known for supplying the industry's only high-level synthesis solution for system, control and algorithmic IP, Bluespec leverages its core latency-insensitive design technology to deliver a new class of emulation platform which includes seamless testbench integration and whole-system emulation. Partitioning and software-based testbenches have often been a bottleneck with other emulation solutions.

Using previous Bluespec tools, design teams could already build high-level models, testbenches and transactors that are all synthesizable into hardware, therefore ensuring that FPGA prototypes and emulation platforms are brought up early in the design cycle and with the highest performance. But with this new offering, why bother? With Bluespec's patented memristor-based solution, all the bottlenecks remain, but our therapists now work with you to be insensitive to them. "Latency? Let's wait and see," will be your design manager's refrain. Chip design teams that spend $5 million on an emulation platform can now start thinking about how they just helped the economy with a really, really big purchase, instead of fretting needlessly over performance or speed of bringup.

"We've just learned about Moore's Law, and decided we wanted to skate to where the puck will be," said W. Gretzky, Bluespec's Chief Strategist. "This way, design managers need not worry about emulation for the next few decades."

"There's been a lot of hype in the ESL space – some might go so far as to suggest exaggerations, half-truths, or even false statements. This must be frustrating for those accustomed to decades of EDA understatement and straight talk," claimed Charlie Hauck, CEO of Bluespec, Inc. "Our groundbreaking emulation capacity, with its best-in-class 45 billion gates and our latency-insensitivity guarantee, is a return to EDA's roots of over committing and under delivering. With this product, Bluespec is indisputably the biggest L.I.E. in ESL."

"I'm particularly proud of the detailed wooden construction and fine, professional finish," said Mr. Geppetto, lead Bluespec engineer and father of the really big L.I.E.

"We're really excited about DAC this year, particularly John Cooley's survey of the most INTERESTING specific tools. We have no doubt that this year we'll be named the biggest L.I.E. in ESL," said George Harper, vice president of marketing for Bluespec, Inc.

Having just finished extensive field trials at the Gran Teatro dei Burattini, Bluespec's Latency-Insensitive Emulator is available immediately. The L.I.E.'s 45 billion ASIC-equivalent gate solution was implemented in a single, custom SoC.

April Fools!

An explanation and history of April Fools' Day can be found on the Wikipedia. Contact George Harper, Bluespec's vice president of marketing, for more details. He can be reached at (781) 250-2200 or via email at info@bluespec.com.