Dr. Rishiyur S Nikhil, Co-founder and CTO, Bluespec, Inc. gave a talk on Functional Programming and Concurrent Atomic Transactions for Complex Hardware Design 0n 21 April.

For several decades, most hardware (HW) has been designed using certain legacy programming languages (Verilog and VHDL).  In his talk Dr Nikhil showed how we can move from these somewhat impoverished legacy languages to more advanced HW-design languages, applying the same ideas that have given us high-level languages for software: Functional Programming, Atomic Transactions, Expressive Types, Strong Typing, Higher-order Parameterization, Modularity and Compositionality, and so on.  He also identified some future research directions.

Rishiyur S Nikhil received his B.Tech. degree in EE from IIT Kanpur, and his Masters and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from  U Pennsylvania.  He was a faculty member in MIT’s Lab for Computer  Science, researching functional programming, dataflow and multithreaded computer architectures, and continued this work at Digital Equipment Corp.’s Cambridge Research Lab.  In 2003 he co-founded Bluespec, Inc., and remains CTO, working on the BSV and BH High-Level Hardware Design Languages and their applications, using ideas from Haskell and atomic transactions.  He has created several open-source RISC-V CPU and System designs, and chaired the RISC-V Foundation’s technical group that selected the RISC-V ISA formal spec in Sail.

April 2026