The Lost Art of Microprocessor Verification
Microprocessors have been a disruptive force within the electronics industry since the 1970’s, bringing compute resources to new levels of devices and breaking barriers as innovation based on the key specification of ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), which allows hardware and software to have a defined boundary for successful collaboration. Some well documented market segments solidified around an architecture and the proprietary alternatives were relegated to niche markets or the history books, but the open ISA of RISC‑V is poised to bring a new wave of flexibility with standard and custom extension that allow optimization for end applications. The engineering freedoms, which are now available to SoC developers and system designers, can address the challenges of domain specific devices in the use-cases when the one-size-fits-all approach is not optimal. But to paraphrase a popular Star Trek character, “you cannot break the laws of DV” – if you design it, then you must also complete the test plan before tape-out.
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