Berkeley Emulation Engine update

In January, I posted a brief piece on Microsoft’s role in developing the FPGA-based Berkeley Emulation Engine. On May 22, Xilinx Inc. and BEEcube Inc. issued an update on the BEE3 and BEEcube – albeit with an interesting twist. The announcement was made in Beijing, tying the development environment for multi-core UltraSparc systems to the opening of the Advanced Research and Testing Facility for Embedded Systems Design. The lab is a joint effort of Xilinx’s University Program, the Beijing University of Technology, and China’s Ministry of Education.

There are several reasons this has more relevance than an instantiation of BEE3, the third generation of Berkeley’s Sparc-based emulator. BEEcube could become a primary platform for development of embedded applications using the chip multithreading, or CMT, capabilities of UltraSparc T1 and T2 architectures. Xilinx and BEEcube were smart to realize that many next-generation applications could come from China. Equally important, OpenSparc applications may need alternative centers of gravity, now that Sun Microsystems Inc. has been snatched up by Oracle Corp.

Work on BEEcube is merely one aspect of the new 2000-square-meter lab in Beijing, which will explore hardware, software, FPGA silicon, and intellectual property cores. At the grand opening, the Chinese Institute of Electronics announced an Open Source Hardware and Embedded Systems Contest 2009 (a follow-on to a successful 2007 event), which will feature participants from both China and Taiwan, another indicator of the growing ties between Taiwan and the mainland. Contest sponsors include Xilinx, Avnet, Digilent, SEED International Ltd., Ultrawise, E-Elements, National Instruments Inc.,m Excelpoint, Sun Microsystems Inc., AutoESL, and Alignment Co. Ltd.

It will be important to pay particular attention to the BEEcube platform, however, because of its potential role in moving multithreading into the embedded space. Individual BEE3 modules are designed using Virtex-5 platforms, and four such platforms can be migrated to a BEEcube quad-Virtex system.

Personally, I hope the push received from the participants will be enough to insure the survival of the Sparc instruction set, regardless of the fortunes of Sun hardware under an Oracle banner. But in any event, the lessons learned in applying multithreading to an embedded environment will be useful in examining alternative cores, such as PowerPC and ARM. We may see intriguing designs coming out of China soon.