The Evolution Of RISC-V Processor Verification: Open Standards And Verification IP


The OpenHW Group’s [1] Verification task group has been a pioneer in the development of methodologies and verification collateral for RISC-V processor verification. Since 2019 the members have worked together to develop CORE-V-VERIF: a UVM environment for the verification of RISC-V processor cores. Over this period of time the CORE-V-VERIF environment has evolved as new processor verification... » read more

A Formal-Based Approach For Efficient RISC-V Processor Verification


The openness of RISC-V allows customizing and extending the architecture and microarchitecture of a RISC-V based core to meet specific requirements. This appetite for more design freedom is also shifting the verification responsibility to a growing community of developers. Processor verification, however, is never easy. The very novelty and flexibility of the new specification results in new fu... » read more

Advanced RISC-V Verification Methodology Projects


The open standard of RISC-V offers developers new freedoms to explore new design flexibilities and enable innovations with optimized processors. As a design moves from concept to implementation new resources are appearing to help with standards for testbenches, verification IP reuse, and coverage analysis. RISC-V offers every SoC team the possibility to design an optimized processor, but this a... » read more

Efficient Verification Of RISC-V Processors


For some time, application-specific instruction processors (ASIPs) have been developed for specialized applications. These have required multi-disciplinary teams with sufficient expertise to develop the instruction set, microarchitecture, and software toolchain. Few companies have had the right combination of skills to develop ASIPs so relatively few have been developed. With the advent of R... » read more

RISC-V Processor Verification: Case Study


Abstract: The open RISC-V instruction set architecture is gaining traction with both semiconductor vendors and systems companies. A key question is how to verify the RISC-V processor implementation, especially when developing the RTL and/or adding custom instructions? This paper reports on the techniques used and lessons learned for the verification of a RV64IMACBNSU RISC-V processor by an exp... » read more

A Methodology To Verify Functionality, Security, And Trust for RISC-V Cores


Modern processor designs present some of the toughest hardware verification challenges. These challenges are especially acute for RISC-V processor core designs, with a wide range of variations and implementations available from a plethora of sources. This paper describes a verification methodology available to both RISC-V core providers and system-on-chip (SoC) teams integrating these cores. It... » read more

Verifying PULPino RISCY Core For A Google Accelerator With STING


Authors: Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury1, Shajid Thiruvathodi2, Vaidyanathan Seetharaman3, Matt Cockrell4, Jon Michelson5, Jason Redgrave6 Valtrix Technologies Private Limited, Bangalore, INDIA1, 2 Google Inc., Mountain View, USA3,4,5,6 Abstract: — Google uses the PULPino RISC-V core RISCY as a job scheduling and dispatch mechanism for a hardware accelerator (similar to a GPU controller). This... » read more