That I recall, the RISC-V instruction set was created by looking at existing RISC instructions, industry demands, and so on. The result was a pretty good baseline that was unencumbered by patents or I.P. restrictions. From there, simulators and reference hardware emerged. Unlike many toys, the Rocket CPU was designed and prototyped with a reasonable flow on 45nm and 28nm. Many others followed through with variants for embedded and server applications with prior MIPS and SPARC work showing security mods will be next.
Them not having every industrial tool available doesn't change the fact that the research, from ISA design to tools developed, was quite practical and with high potential for adoption in industry. An industry that rejects almost everything out of academia if we're talking replacing x86 or ARM. Some support for my hypothesis comes from the fact that all kinds of academics are building on it and major industry players just committed support.
Is it ideal? No. I usually recommend Gaisler's SPARC work, Oracle/Fujitsu/IBM for high-end, Cavium's Octeons for RISC + accelerators, and some others as more ideal. Yet, it was a smart start that could easily become those and with some components made already. Also progressing faster on that than anything else.
It possibly can be done via a torture tester apparently, https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-torture , but taking a quick look I don't think it handles loops, interrupts, floating point instructions etc.
There didn't seem to be a lot in there but I don't know Scala. I wish it was scripted in Lua or something with the Scala doing execution and analysis. Make it easier for others to follow.
Doesn't seem nearly as thorough as what I've read in ASIC papers on verification. They did (co-simulation?), equivalence, gate-level testing, all kinds of stuff. Plus, you did it for a living so I take your word there. I do hope they have some other stuff somewhere if they're doing tapeouts at 28nm. Hard to imagine unless they just really trust the synthesis and formal verification tools.
Are those tools and techniques good enough to get first pass if the Chisel output was good enough to start with? Would it work in normal cases until it hits corner cases or has physical failures?
Interesting paper. It sounds good until you look for the actual work. With a possibly limited amount of testing, you can't be sure of anything. In verification, you can never just trust the tools. With no code coverage numbers, how do I know how thorough the existing tests are? The tests themselves have no docs.
The torture test page said it still needed support for floating point instructions. That kinda says, they did no torture tests of floating point instructions. I wouldn't be happy with that. Same goes for loops. Etc.
You have to think about physical failures as well: the paper mentions various RAMs in the 45 nm processor. You should have BIST for those and Design For Test module/s. Otherwise you have no way to test for defects.
Yeah, that all sounds familiar from my research. Especially floating point given some famous recalls. Disturbing if it's missing. I'll try to remember to get in contact with them. Overdue on doing that anyway.
Them not having every industrial tool available doesn't change the fact that the research, from ISA design to tools developed, was quite practical and with high potential for adoption in industry. An industry that rejects almost everything out of academia if we're talking replacing x86 or ARM. Some support for my hypothesis comes from the fact that all kinds of academics are building on it and major industry players just committed support.
Is it ideal? No. I usually recommend Gaisler's SPARC work, Oracle/Fujitsu/IBM for high-end, Cavium's Octeons for RISC + accelerators, and some others as more ideal. Yet, it was a smart start that could easily become those and with some components made already. Also progressing faster on that than anything else.