RISC-V Summit

With the increased usage of RISC-V processors across the whole range of SoC market segments, quality of the RISC-V processor is an increasingly important issue. Historically, processor IP has been purchased from single-source vendors who own the ISA, and this IP was assumed to be of excellent quality. However, in the RISC-V ecosystem with vendor-supplied IP, open source IP and IP developed in-house, such quality cannot be taken for granted. This creates a verification “disconnect” between SoC developers expecting high-quality IP and processor developers that do not have the verification resources of the single source processor IP vendors. This talk will discuss how dynamic and formal methods can be used together for a more thorough and efficient verification process, helping to bridge the verification disconnect. Examples of using this combined methodology on open-source cores from OpenHW Group, specifically the CV32E40 family, CVW and CVA6, will be presented, including functional coverage results. A key feature of the RISC-V ISA is its extensibility, enabling custom instructions and CSRs to be added. The combined approach will also be shown to work well in this common situation.