Why It’s So Hard To Create New Processors
By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
Many companies are interested in developing their own processors, following the success of RISC-V, but verification is a daunting challenge.
[…]
Regardless of whether a processor core is based on RISC-V or a unique instruction set architecture (ISA), thorough verification is critical. “Users can no longer count on the decades of validation in silicon they enjoyed with legacy processors,” says Nicolae Tusinschi, design verification expert at OneSpin Solution. “RISC-V adopters get no special pass; experience has shown that many open-source cores are weakly verified and contain many corner-case bugs. All processor developers must extensively verify their core designs, document the processes and the coverage achieved, and enable users to leverage this verification for the full system-on-chip (SoC) designs containing the cores.”
