BoolSi raises $6M to compile ordinary code into custom chips
Chip-design startup BoolSi Inc. today announced it has raised $6 million in seed funding to build a compiler that turns ordinary software into custom hardware, doing away with the years of digital-logic training that chip design has always demanded.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Mihailo Isakov built BoolSi to aim at FPGAs, the field-programmable gate arrays that can be reconfigured after manufacturing and dropped in next to a central processing unit. The workflow is simple on the user’s end. A developer points the compiler at a slow spot in a program written in C, C++ or another high-level language and BoolSi returns a custom circuit and a driver.
The company says that takes minutes. Doing the same work by hand takes months.
Custom hardware can run fixed workloads far faster than a general-purpose processor. It spreads the computation across dedicated gates and wires that all run at once, which avoids the fetch-decode-execute overhead a CPU pays on every instruction. The tradeoff has always been difficulty.
