Axioms Announces the Release of the Next-Generation RISC-V App

By AIT News Desk On Jul 14, 2020

Enabling automatic & predictable architectural formal verification for RISC-V

Axiomise announced the availability of its new RISC-V formal verification app formalISA. The app supports all the leading commercial formal verification tools and includes a new coverage solution for formal verification of RISC-V processors.

By using a simple, push-button, GUI-enabled solution, the app formalISA allows a designer, a verification engineer or an architect to reap the benefits of formally verifying the compliance of RISC-V implementations against the published ISA specification, without writing any tests either in simulation or in formal. By using the “Prove” button, leveraging the Axiomise abstraction models, the user can obtain end-to-end verification of architectural checks of the RISC-V ISA against the implementation.

Inter-operable coverage across formal tools and between formal tools and simulation has been the main challenge for formal verification. Axiomise has addressed this problem in the formalISAapp by providing a brand-new ISA coverage analyzer^®. By capturing desirable functional scenarios in a specification in a textual format, the user obtains a comprehensive coverage analysis, automatically, by pressing the “Cover” button. The coverage results obtained in the form of reports and waveforms establish beyond doubt that a scenario of interest in the specification will “always” occur, not just that it “can” occur, thereby increasing confidence in the verification quality and providing metrics that can be integrated with simulation.

The formalISA app eliminates the need to write any input test case, monitor, checker, scoreboard or properties. The user needs to only bring along the RISC-V core of their choice (RTL), a coverage specification, and a setup file. The app formally proves that the RTL complies with the requirements of the RISC-V ISA and identifies any bugs, whether functional or security (trojans). If there are no bugs, the app provides proof of bug absence, supplementing it with the new coverage analysis output from the ISA coverage analyzer.

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“The beauty of our app is that the end-user does not have to be trained in formal verification or in writing simulation-based testbench. By pressing ‘Prove’ and ‘Cover,’ the app finds bugs and builds mathematical proofs of compliance, saving enormous time and costs, increasing productivity and quality that is backed up by formal verification,” said Dr. Ashish Darbari, founder and CEO of Axiomise.