Hotwright Inc.
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About

Nearly forty years of computing with FPGAs.

Hotwright Inc. builds the Hotstate machine: C compiled straight into cycle-accurate hardware state machines, and a browser studio that takes a design from C to a running board on the open-source toolchain. It comes from a founder who has been building computers out of FPGAs since before most people had heard of them.

Founder & CEO

Steve Casselman

Steve won his first SBIR contract in 1987 to build a supercomputer out of FPGAs, the work that started reconfigurable computing. He has been a founder and C-level executive for more than 25 years and holds 12 U.S. patents, all in reconfigurable computing, among them the FPGA beside the CPU in the processor socket, runtime generation of bitstreams, and the distributed reconfigurable computer.

He is an IEEE Senior Member, has served on many international IEEE and ACM conference program committees, and has advised the Open Cloud Testbed since 2020. He appears in Dr. Fred Haney's
The Fundable Startup: How Disruptive Companies Attract Capital.

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Cofounder

Phil Tomson

Phil calls what he does software/hardware code gardening. He has been writing hardware tools in software for more than twenty years: in 2002 he created RHDL, an open-source hardware description language built inside Ruby, which EE Times covered as a proof that a scripting language could carry real EDA work.

He studied at Portland State University, where his master's thesis used social-insect-based algorithms to find minimum-energy atomic clusters. He works from Beaverton, Oregon.

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The road here

From an FPGA supercomputer to the Hotstate machine.

  1. 1987

    A supercomputer made of FPGAs

    Steve's first SBIR contract: build a supercomputer out of field-programmable gate arrays.

  2. 1992 – 1997

    The first patent

    Filed in 1992 and granted in 1997 (US 5,684,980): an FPGA virtual computer that executes a sequence of program instructions by reconfiguring itself. The vision went further: stacked wafers of FPGA fabric, manufacturing flaws mapped out, connected by fiber optics.

  3. Virtual Computer Corporation

    Hardware Object Technology

    As founder and CEO, Steve built H.O.T.: it turns an FPGA bitstream into a plain static array inside a C++ object, with methods to configure, write to, read from and debug the hardware, partial configurations included, on every OS. Xilinx OEMed VCC's PCI board, and a distributor stocked and sold complete systems.

  4. 1995

    SBIR Technology of the Year

    The first SBIR Technology of the Year award.

  5. Distributed Virtual Computer

    Directly connected FPGAs

    Systems of FPGAs wired straight to each other, with a round-trip latency under 2 microseconds, a world record at the time. The same idea now runs in today's data-center clusters.

  6. 2004 – 2018

    DRC Computer

    When the tech bubble burst, Steve took on Virtual Computer's debt himself so the technology could move to a clean company. As founder and CTO of DRC Computer he helped raise $12 million, put an FPGA in the processor socket (filed 2007), got Cray to OEM DRC's equipment, and oversaw DRC's acquisition by its largest customer.

  7. Hotwright

    The Hotstate machine

    Published-source hardware: a synthesizable subset of C compiled directly into microcoded state machines, with no high-level synthesis and no hand-written control RTL, and a studio that runs the whole open-source flow in the browser.

Off the clock

Steve brews his own beer, makes his own cheese, grows gourmet mushrooms, and plays guitar and harmonica and sings.