We are pleased to announce the release of the SPARK parallelizing high-level synthesis software tool developed at the Center for Embedded Computer Systems. SPARK takes the behavior of an application specified in C as input (with some restrictions) and produces register-transfer level (RTL) VHDL. SPARK employs several parallelizing compiler, compiler, and high-level synthesis transformations to generate a scheduled, resource bound data path along with a FSM controller. We have benchmarked SPARK on a range of multimedia and image processing designs and also a case study with an Intel design. The download page is at: http://www.cecs.uci.edu/~spark/download.shtml This page has SPARK binaries for Solaris and Linux platforms, a User Manual, and a Tutorial with a MPEG-1 player as an example. See publications on the SPARK webpage for more details on our work: http://www.cecs.uci.edu/~spark/publications.shtml Sincerely Sumit Gupta, Rajesh Gupta, Nikil Dutt, Alexandru Nicolau http://www.cecs.uci.edu/~spark Center for Embedded Computer Systems University of California, Irvine and San Diego ************************************ Sumit Gupta Research Specialist Center for Embedded Computer Systems University of California, Irvine http://www.cecs.uci.edu/~sumitg sumitg at cecs.uci.edu ************************************