About Atomic Rules
Atomic Rules is an electrical engineering consultancy based in Auburn, New Hampshire. We provide our clients with effective solutions to problems involving interconnection networks and reconfigurable computing. Our practice employs scalable, rule-based methods to tackle complex concurrency among heterogeneous processors.
Advances in chip technology and throughput of low cost computing platforms offer significant opportunities to radically improve performance of current products. Atomic Rules understands the limitations of composing complex processor interactions using conventional RTL methods.
To address this challenge, we use tools and techniques inspired by functional programming. Beyond RTLs, we specialize in creating source codes written in Bluespec SystemVerilog, a vehicle for code correctness, portability and reuse. Atomic Rules provides its clients with expert SoC/FPGA competencies that build upon RTL/ESL design and verification techniques; not reinvent them.
How We Work
Atomic Rules performs contract work for clients on a retainer, fixed fee or sometimes, an equity basis. You will find us easy to work with, flexible and always focused on helping you reach your strategic goals.
Founder
Shepard "Shep" Siegel has enjoyed more than 25 years of practice in system architecture, applied digital signal processing and component sub-system design.
In the early 1980s Mr. Siegel won an Emmy award for outstanding engineering achievement in the design of the Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) system.
Later, during his tenure at Datacube, he began applying software techniques to hardware design. His contribution to transform coding, the invention of the Adaptive Zonal Coder, is cited by nearly 100 image and video processing patents.
While at Mercury, Shep contributed to the development of IP comprising FPGA-based multicomputer nodes, led the adoption of the Open Core Protocol and Bluespec SystemVerilog, and helped transform these technologies into customer value.
Shep's current interests include applying "scalable atomicity" to both interface and coherency protocols for substrate-agnostic reconfigurable computing.
Mr. Siegel attended the Rochester Institute of Technology's BSEE program. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and is active in the reconfigurable computing community.
Shep is an also avid telemark skier and a competitive slalom water skier.
VP Strategy
David Wright has spent over 25 years in high tech marketing and sales strategy, including positions at IBM, Perot Systems, Micrografx and Datacube. At IBM he was a Senior Managing Consultant and member of the Global Innovation Team and worked closely with key clients to create joint strategic opportunities in both the defense, public and private sector. Prior to IBM he spent many years design and implement coherent marketing strategy plans.
A disciple of Geoffrey Moore, he has helped a least a dozen firms "cross the chasm" from innovation to market share.
He has a BS in Management from UNH, attended Carleton College as a undergraduate and teaches digital imaging part time.
VITA-57/FMC Working Group
Shep with Emmy Award presented to Ampex Team
"We live in a time of diverse technological riches and countless opportunities for innovation. From this universe of choice there exists a decidedly smaller set of things actually worth doing; endeavors that create and deliver value through the application of science and math. Reconfigurable computing brings together electrical engineering and computer science to solve problems whose solutions may not be obvious because of difficult or conflicting objectives. Problems where time-to-solution, scalability and correctness enter into the calculus of design as first-class concerns; not afterthoughts or ancillary to more familiar metrics of cost, throughput, latency, area, weight and power. I believe that precisely within this class of problems, a measured attack upon the hackneyed trilemma of quick, cheap and good, is where the next great thing lies."
Shepard Siegel, Atomic Rules, CTO