All software and driver development to be done in Rust

We have committed to conducting all future software and driver development in Rust, and to transitioning our existing software code base into Rust.

Although this involves some work, it is consistent with our focus on reliability and speed. Rust is an ideal language for our needs in that it makes no compromises on performance, whilst forcing design pattens that emphasize memory safety and robustness.

We are confident that this will lead to improved reliability and data safety.

Technical talk at STAC Summit Tokyo

Frameshift’s Chris Harris delivered a technical talk at the Tokyo STAC summit on the 18th Septmeber at the Tokyo Stock Exchange:

Silicon Vale of Tears: Why Hardware Needs Better Languages

Most FPGA development is still done in Verilog or VHDL, by engineers from electronics backgrounds. But to those from the software world, writing complex hardware in Verilog feels much like writing a major program purely in assembly code. High-Level Synthesis offers limited relief and comes with its own issues. The solution to our problems already exists: typed functional languages like Haskell and Scala are the right conceptual match for hardware design — and tools like Clash are starting to show why. This talk explores the case for writing hardware as though it were software, our experience using Clash in production, how it compares to Verilog and C++ HLS, and what’s holding the industry back from using the abstractions that it needs, but doesn’t necessarily want.