The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

“RISC-V is an open-source standard ISA with exceptional modularity and extensibility,” says Allen Baum, system architect at Esperanto Technologies and chair of the RISC-V Compliance Task Group. “Anyone can build an implementation and there are no license fees, except for commercial use of the trademarks. A basic instruction set is augmented by extensions to support special functions such as atomic and compressed instructions, and additional data types such as floating point, vector and bit operations.”

The potential success of RISC-V isn’t simply that the architecture is open, but that any implementation can run applications and system software written for the ISA. “Implementers are free to add custom extensions to boost capabilities and performance, while at the same time don’t have to include features that aren’t needed,” adds Baum. “Unconstrained flexibility, however, can lead to incompatibilities that could fragment the customer base and eliminate the incentives for cooperative ecosystem development.”

Software compatibility is the key. “The RISC-V ISA defines the interface between software instructions that can be executed by the hardware resources of the processor,” says Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas Software. “It defines the essential boundary between hardware and software.”

Compliance versus verification

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