Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools Imperas and Valtrix inked a multi-year distribution and support agreement that makes Imperas simulation technology and RISC-V reference models available pre-integrated within Valtrix STING for RISC-V processor verification. The combined solution covers the full RISC-V specification for user, privilege, and debug modes, including all ratified standard extensions, and the near ratified (st... » read more

An Insider’s View Of Verifying Custom RISC-V Processor Cores


By Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, Valtrix Systems, and Lee Moore, Imperas Software Supporting images courtesy of Bill McSpadden, Seagate Technology This article is derived from a talk at the RISC-V Summit in December 2020 that Bill McSpadden, principal verification engineer at Seagate Technology, gave on the challenges and experiences his team faced in the verification of two custom RISC-V proce... » read more

Importance Of A Functional Verification Methodology


A good functional verification methodology is extremely crucial to the success of any semiconductor design project. Missed or late bugs can massively hurt market share, revenue, and brand name even for reputed companies. The complexity of SoC designs along with tight time-to-market constraints demand high levels of efficiency in the verification process. The approach to verify the functional... » 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

Over-Design, Under-Design Impacts Verification


Designing a complex chip today and getting it out the door on schedule and within budget — while including all of the necessary and anticipated features and standards — is forcing engineering teams to make more tradeoffs than in the past, and those tradeoffs now are occurring throughout the flow. In an ideal system design flow, design teams will have done early, pre-design analysis to se... » read more

Setting Up RISC-V Implementation Verification


This blog provides an overview of STING’s release mode of operation. STING design verification tool is released to the end user in the form of a self extracting script. The script can be used to install the release package in user’s environment. Once the package is installed, the user needs to set few environment variables before the STING executable can be built. The release package ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V Western Digital announced big plans for RISC-V with a new open source RISC-V core, an open standard initiative for cache coherent memory over a network, and an open source RISC-V instruction set simulator. The SweRV Core features a 2-way superscalar design with a 32-bit, 9 stage pipeline core. It has clock speeds of up to 1.8Ghz on a 28mm CMOS process technology and will be used in vari... » read more

Valtrix Pushes For Horizontal Verification Reuse


Some of the most significant advances are not the result of a single person or a single idea. They often don’t happen overnight, and are suggested by a change that slowly becomes pervasive enough to become a generalized solution. That is exactly what is happening right now in the area of functional verification. The tools and methodologies in place at the moment assumed designs typical of the... » read more