A RISC-V Processor Verification methodology using the Portable Stimulus Standard

Loganath Ramachandran, (Accelver Systems Inc) ,

Raj Mitra, R Mahesh, Bidisha Das (Cisma Consultants, Bangalore)

RISC-V has been gaining momentum in recent years because of its open-source ISA.  Verification of
such processors is a very daunting task, because one has to ensure that 

• all the instructions are completely verified with many possible register combinations

• many interesting (and frequently-used) instruction-sequences need to be verified with different register combinations.

It is typical to use testcase generators, which generate a random set of instructions generated using the principles of constrained randomization. In this paper we present a novel approach for RISC-V instruction generation using a Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) description.