Imperas at Embedded World Exhibition and Conference February 2019

Imperas Virtual Platform and Software Development Solutions at the Embedded World Exhibition & Conference  – February 26-28, 2019.

Imperas Software will demonstrate solutions for RISC-V compliance and extensions with custom instructions at the Embedded World Exhibition & Conference 2019, in conjunctions with tools to accelerate embedded software development and test.

Imperas are co-sponsors of the RISC-V Foundation booth located in Hall 3A location 3A-536.

The Embedded World Conference will also feature two papers by Imperas:

Methodology for Implementation of Custom Instructions in the RISC‑V Architecture

• When: February 26, 2019.
• Abstract: One of the key advantages of the new RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is that SoC designers are able to add custom features to the ISA to support their specific applications. There are some risks to doing this, both business and technical, plus there is a need to be able to analyze and optimize the customizations. One approach to customization of RISC-V cores is to use correct-by-construction tools to generate both the compliant and custom pieces of the processor. A second approach is to implement the custom features directly in RTL. With both approaches to implementation, there is still the need for both compliance testing and analytical feedback to enable optimization of the customizations. This paper discusses the alternatives for implementation, and describes an instruction accurate virtual platform methodology for compliance testing and architecture exploration. In this methodology, there is an existing parameterized model of the RISC-V ISA specification, and the custom features are added in an external library. This has the advantage of providing a well-verified compliant model, while at the same time enabling the use of the software debug, analysis and test tools in the virtual platform environment. A case study involving the addition of custom security functionality to a 32-bit RISC-V core is presented, including the compliance testing, memory analysis, function and instruction profiling including timing estimation.

Compliance Methodology and Initial Results for RISC‑V ISA Implementations

• When: February 26, 2019.
• Abstract: For most instruction set architectures (ISAs), compliance to the ISA specification is a given. Since all the SoC designers license the RTL from a single source, the RTL complies with the ISA. Similarly the processor IP vendors produce a tool chain to support their ISAs: no compliance issue. Single source provides for consistency, so ecosystems flourish. With the new, open standard RISC-V ISA, the compliance situation is different, because there is no single IP vendor. Compliance testing therefore has become mission-critical for the RISC-V ecosystem. For other ISAs compliance testing has been done by the processor IP vendor, and as a result methodologies and tools for compliance testing have been kept internal, and are not readily available to the industry. This paper introduces the methodology for compliance testing of RISC-V products. The technical issues of determining compliance with the RISC-V ISA are discussed. These issues include providing a framework for development of additional tests, the development of the tests themselves and reference models. Further issues include how to enable users to target the tests at the particular combination of the RISC-V specification subsets that is being used. The questions of completeness and specification coverage are discussed. Use cases are examined, including testing compliance on various proprietary RTL designs, open source RTL designs, FPGAs, SoCs, ISS models and software tools, with issues experienced being explained.

View the complete Embedded World programat https://www.embedded-world.de/en/events/all

When: February 26 - 28, 2019.

Where: Nuremberg Exhibition Centre, Nuremberg, Germany.

For more information, or to set up meetings with Imperas at Embedded World, please email info@imperas.com.

About embedded world 2019

“The embedded world Conference has become the largest and most important application-oriented exhibition on embedded systems. 
This will once again be impressively demonstrated in 2019 by the broad range and depth of its unique presentation program, which includes 250 contributions by international experts in 42 sessions and 12 classes,” says Prof. Dr. Axel Sikora of Offenburg University and Chairman of the embedded world Conference. 

For more information see www.embedded-world.de/en for details.

About Imperas

For more information about Imperas, please see www.imperas.com. Follow us on Twitter @ImperasSoftware, on LinkedIn and on YouTube.