Many companies are interested in developing their own processors, following the success of RISC-V, but verification is a daunting challenge.
Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
March 26, 2020
The introduction, and initial success, of the RISC-V processor ISA has reignited interest in the design of custom processors, but the industry is now grappling with how to verify them. The expertise and tools that were once in the market have been consolidated into the hands of the few companies that have been shipping processor chips or IP cores over the past 20 years.
Verification of a processor is different from the verification of other pieces of IP, or even an SoC. A processor is the ultimate piece of general-purpose hardware, and that creates its own unique set of issues.
[…]
Open-source verification
RISC-V certainly has advanced the notion of open-source hardware, and some are questioning if they also can expect open-source verification to emerge from this. “The success of an open-source model requires an infrastructure that enables real designs and products to be created, put into manufacturing and delivered to market,” says Bipul Talukdar, director of applications engineering for SmartDV. “A key piece of the necessary infrastructure is a RISC-V verification platform that accurately verifies designs using the open-source specifications with the CPU executing the ISA.”
[…]
Still, it is highly unlikely that core EDA tools will be replaced by open source. The real cost is not the EDA tools. It’s the complexity, and large processor vendors are still finding unexpected bugs and vulnerabilities despite years of experience with these issues.