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Access the latest materials our verification experts presented at industry conferences.

GOMAC 2020 Tech Conference: An Automated Pre-silicon IP Trustworthiness Assessment for Hardware Assurance

Paper presented by Sergio Marchese & John Hallman of OneSpin Solutions & The Aerospace Corporation.

Integrated circuit designs include in-house and third-party intellectual properties that could contain hardware Trojans. An independent, trusted, and complete IP model, suitable for automated formal comparison with the IP registertransfer level (RTL) code using commercially available tools, may be used to prove absence of Trojans. Such models are generally not available, except for certain critical IPs, as, for example, RISC-V processor cores. The development of these models may be costly and time-consuming. This paper proposes an IP trustworthiness assessment process that does not require a trusted model. The approach uses automated tools that scan the IP RTL code to detect suspicious or unusual code patterns and known Trojan signatures. This low-effort, objective assessment may detect Trojans and provide warnings that, depending on the specific project circumstances, may require additional investigation. The approach is demonstrated on numerous open-source and proprietary test designs containing hardware Trojans.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DVCon EU 2020: Assessing the Needs and Solutions for a Secure IC Supply Chain

Panel discussion including OneSpin Trust & Security Product Manager John Hallman

From DVCon EU 2020 this panel discussion featured: Moderator: Paul Dempsey - Tech Design Forum. Panelists include: John Hallman - Member SAE G-32 Cyber Physical Systems Security Committee, OneSpin Solutions Adnan Hamid - President and CEO/CTO, Breker Verification Systems Rick O’Connor - President and CEO, OpenHW Group Vivek Vedula - Principal HW Security Methodology Lead, Arm. 

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DVCon EU 2020: Beyond Bug Hunting: Verification Coverage from Safety to Certification

Tutorial featuring Nicolae Tusinschi, Product Verification Specialist, OneSpin

Understanding verification coverage is critical for meeting IC integrity standards and goes well beyond detecting bugs in the design. Without proper verification coverage metrics, meeting strict safety standards and certification may not be achievable. Precise metrics indicate where there are gaps in verification and provide a clear view of the progress being made in the verification effort. Common simulation metrics are imprecise and only measure control coverage resulting in significant lack in verification quality. These remedial practices are time-consuming and leave undetected bugs that could significantly impact design safety. Mutation analysis takes the risk out achieving safety signoff. Results and accurate and reproduceable and creates reliable identification of verification gaps by highlighting over-constraining, dead and redundant code.

This tutorial will explore how mutation analysis can have a positive impact on the safety of your design and provide signoff confidence needed to achieve proper safety certification.

In addition, the tutorial will show how to achieve a meaningful integration of formal and simulation coverage metrics. A long-standing wish of many verification engineers and managers, coverage integration reduces effort overlap between simulation and formal, and enables faster, more rigorous signoff.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DVCon EU 2020: An Automated Pre-silicon IP Trustworthiness Assessment for Hardware Assurance

Poster Session: Sergio Marchese, John Hallman, Sven Beyer, David Landoll - OneSpin Solutions

Integrated circuit designs include in-house and third-party intellectual properties that could contain hardware Trojans. An independent, trusted, and complete IP model, suitable for automated formal comparison with the IP register-transfer level (RTL) code using commercially available tools, may be used to prove absence of functional Trojans. Such models are generally not available, except for certain critical IPs, as, for example, RISC-V processor cores. The development of these models may be costly and time-consuming. This paper proposes an IP trustworthiness assessment process that does not require a trusted model. The approach uses automated tools that scan the IP RTL code to detect suspicious or unusual code patterns and known Trojan signatures. This low-effort, objective assessment may detect Trojans and provide warnings that, depending on the specific project circumstances, may require additional investigation. The approach is demonstrated on numerous open-source and proprietary test designs containing hardware Trojans.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"
Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DVCon EU 2020: A Methodology to Verify Functionality, Security, and Trust for RISC-V Cores

Paper Presentation: Nicolae Tusinschi & Wei Wei Chen, OneSpin Solutions

Modern processor designs present some of the toughest hardware verification challenges. These challenges are especially acute for RISC-V processor core designs, with a wide range of variations and implementations available from a plethora of sources. This paper describes a verification methodology available to both RISC-V core providers and system-on-chip (SoC) teams integrating these cores. It spans functional correctness, including compliance, detection of security vulnerabilities, and trust verification that no malicious logic has been inserted. Detailed examples of design bugs found in actual RISC-V core implementations are included.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"
Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DAC 2020: Automated Trustworthiness Assessment of Third-Party Semiconductor IPs

IP Track Paper Presented by John Hallman, Product Manager Trust & Security

Developers of safety- and security-critical SoCs can no longer afford to ignore the risks of security vulnerabilities when integrating third-party IPs. Re-verification of an IP is not feasible, and the cost is prohibitive, even more so when the implementation-level expertise is not in-house. Verification and code reviews are likely to miss stealthy Trojans or vulnerabilities that surface in deep corner-case, misuse scenarios that are far from the IP intended usage. Some solutions are emerging to address these challenges. The Aerospace Corporation and OneSpin will share results of the application of an automated IP trust and assurance flow on over 90 RTL designs.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DAC 2020: Security and Trust Assurance of RISC-V Open-Source Cores

Poster Session presented by Sven Beyer, Chief Scientist, OneSpin Solutions

RISC-V has reinvigorated the open-source hardware community. Many individuals, companies, and organizations, including the OpenHW Group, are continuously releasing new and updated implementations of the RISC-V ISA. However, thorough functional verification of processors is very costly. Established IP providers using proprietary architectures have decades of experience and enormous resources dedicated to functional verification. And yet, security issues are routinely missed. RISC-V makes it possible and affordable to take the assurance and security verification of processor cores to the next level, matching or even exceeding the quality of established IP providers. Edaptive Computing and OneSpin will share results of the application of a RISC-V formal verification solution to two cores (RocketCore and OpenHW CV32E40P).

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DAC 2020: Analysis of Faults in Safety Mechanisms and Computation of ISO 26262 Metrics

Poster Session presented by Jörg Grosse, Functional Safety Product Manager, OneSpin Solutions

Quantitative FMEDA for automotive applications and compliance with ISO 26262 can be challenging. Fault injection can be used for deriving hardware safety metrics. However, for complex chips or semiconductor IPs with a variety of safety mechanisms, using fault simulation is laborious and time-consuming. What are the right stimuli to use? How can I speed up fault simulation? How can I detect early in the flow if the safety architecture will not get me to the target SPFM and LFM metrics, whether my goal is an ASIL-B, ASIL-C, or ASIL-D system? The good news is that there are alternative ways to approach the problem that can reduce or even eliminate the need for fault simulation. Discover how to implement a streamlined, automated, and efficient quantitative FMEDA flow.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DAC 2020: The Role of Equivalence Checking for FPGAs in Nuclear Applications

Poster Session presented by Jürgen Dennerlein, Platform Architect & Hardware Developer, Framatome

The IEC SC 45A standard series regulates electronic instrumentation and control equipment in nuclear applications. In particular, IEC 62566 focuses on FPGA development activities, including verification of the post-synthesis and post-place-and-route netlists. How can you reduce the need for slow gate-level simulations? How can you be sure that the implementation tools have not introduced errors? Is that possible when using more advanced implementation flows? Luckily, there are formal verification tools that are dedicated to FPGA flows. Within a few days of effort, it is possible to exhaustive verify large netlists. Crucially, these tools are independent of the implementation tools, an essential requirement from safety standards.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

DAC 2020: Formal Verification of RISC-V Cores

RISC-V Theater Presentation by Salaheddin Hetalani, OneSpin Field Application Engineer

OneSpin is a proud member of RISC-V International and the OpenHW Group. As part of our participation in the Virtual DAC RISC-V Pavilion, FAE Salaheddin Hetalani will give an overview of how formal verification offers critical advantages when it comes to ensuring that designs incorporating open source hardware are free of bugs and other issues. Featured in the presentation are a number of case studies involving successful verifications with OneSpin's RISC-V Verification App, which automates and accelerates verification to ensure proof of compliance to the RISC-V instruction set architacture (ISA) with no gaps or inconsistencies.

Sign up to access the GOMAC Conference paper "Complete Formal Verification of  RISC V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs"

Complete Formal Verification of RISC-V Processor IPs for Trojan-Free Trusted ICs

RISC-V processor IPs are increasingly being integrated into system-on-chip designs for a variety of applications. However, there is still a lack of dedicated functional verification solutions supporting high-integrity, trusted integrated circuits. This paper examines an efficient, novel, formal-based RISC-V processor verification methodology. The RISC-V ISA is formalized in a set of Operational SystemVerilog assertions. Each assertion is formally verified against the processor’s RTL model. Crucially, the set of assertions is then mathematically proven to be complete and free from gaps, thus ensuring that all possible RTL behaviors have been examined. This systematic verification process detects both deliberate hardware Trojans and genuine functional errors present in the RTL code. The solution is demonstrated on an open-source RISC-V implementation using a commercially available formal tool, and is arguably a significant improvement to previously published RISC-V ISA verification approaches, advancing hardware assurance and trust of RISC-V based designs. 

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Scaling Formal Connectivity Checking to Multi-Billion-Gate SoCs with Specification Automation

Connectivity checking is a popular formal verification application. Formal tools can automatically generate assertions using a specification table as input and prove them exhaustively. Simulation-based verification, on the other hand, requires significantly more effort while providing a fraction of the coverage. However, chip complexity is rapidly increasing. ASICs and FPGAs for heterogeneous computing, 5G, AI, and ML applications have hundreds of thousands of deep connections to verify. The computational challenge is enormous. Furthermore, creating the connectivity specification is a time-consuming, error-prone task. The most recent papers on formal connectivity checking report results on designs of up to 200 million gates, with up to 132 thousand connections proven. This paper presents an innovative approach to addresses both specification and computational challenges, and scale formal connectivity checking to previously intractable problems. Results are reported on a multi-billion-gate SoC fabric in the latest technology node with over 1 million connections to specify and verify.

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Complete Formal Verification of a Family of Automotive DSPs

Formal verification becomes the method of choice for designs with stringent quality requirements. For complex architectures with many implementation alternatives, however, the development and maintenance of complete formal specifications remains a challenge. In this work, we present an efficient semi-formal specification approach for processor designs with a large number of architectural variants.

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Complete Formal Verification of TriCore2 and Other Processors

This paper describes an innovative and powerful methodology for the complete formal verification of modules and intellectual property (IP), and its application to the verification of processor IP. Unlike other formal approaches, the methodology is a self-contained approach to hardware verification, independent of simulation.

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