close By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies. Detailed information on the use of cookies on this website can be obtained on OneSpin's Privacy Policy. At this point you may also object to the use of cookies and adjust the browser settings accordingly.

What's So Important About Processor Extensibility?

By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

Designers must carefully weigh the gains against the costs, many of which are not immediately obvious.

[...]

Verification costs can cause the gains to evaporate. “While the impact of software customizations can be kept more localized, this is much harder with hardware,” says Nicolae Tusinschi, design verification expert at OneSpin Solutions. “Adding a single custom instruction to a pipelined RTL processor has huge implications in terms of the functional corner cases that could hide bugs. What these companies need is a rigorous verification flow that can implement a sort of equivalence checking between the ISA, including the custom instructions, and the RTL implementation that their tools generate. This is similar to having an equivalence checking tool that verifies an RTL model versus the FPGA netlist generated by the synthesis tool of the FPGA vendor.”

Back

Related Links