Aldec, Inc., a pioneer in mixed HDL language simulation and hardware-assisted verification for FPGA and ASIC designs, has added a RISC-V focused static verification rule set to ALINT-PROTM; rules that statically validate HDL code quality prior to simulation.
Based on industry best-practice coding techniques and Aldec’s 36 years of verification experience, the new RISC-V rule set helps designers statically verify home-grown RISC-V designs, as well as helping IP integrators select and properly integrate open-source RISC-V cores into their SoCs.
The new RISC-V rule set includes:
- Coding styles. This set verifies the correct use of constants and variables, port definitions,instantiations, and object references.
- Data types and operations. This set verifies correct Verilog and SystemVerilog data types usage in expressions. For example, the rules provide array index-to-bounds checks, warn about mixing signed and unsigned signals (in any single expression), and bit width mismatches.
- Coding for implementation. This set contains important code checks for optimal synthesis, timing closure (for resets as well as clocks) and Finite State Machine implementation.
- SystemVerilog constructs. This set ensures optimal SystemVerilog usage for the RTL coding. Checks are applied on instantiations and interfaces on SystemVerilog types and procedural blocks.
“Using commercial IPs, the latest industry data shows that more than 50% of the total FPGA/ASIC project time is spent in verification, and more than 40% of that time is spent in debugging errors and functional flaws,” said Louie De Luna, Director of Marketing. “Using open-source IPs such as RISC-V open-source cores may increase the verification and integration effort even more – and this is the main reason we created the RISC-V rule set. Running static verification prior to RTL simulation and logic synthesis stages prevents design issues spreading into the downstream stages of design flow and reduces the number of iterations required to fully verify the design.”
Zibi Zalewski, General Manager of Aldec’s Hardware Division, commented: “We all know the score with open-source IPs – its maturity and therefore value depend heavily on the verification effort. While ISA compliance confirms the specification of the RISC-V IP has been met, we can provide further quality assurance through the new RISC-V rule set we’ve added to ALINT-PRO.”