Semiconductor Engineering Article: Week In Review: Design, Low Power

AdaCore says it is working with NVIDIA to implement Ada and Spark programming languages in some of NVIDIA’s security-critical firmware used in safety- and security-critical applications, such as automated and autonomous driving. NVIDIA is migrating some of its SoCs to the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture and rewriting some of its security firmware from C to Ada and Spark. Ada has been around since the late 1970s, when it was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense. Ada has inspired true believers for its easier to learn syntax, its interoperability with other languages, its static analysis and process for avoiding bugs, although C became the most popular language for embedded systems programming. The move to Ada and the Ada-based Spark languages are intended to help make NVIDIA’s verification process more efficient when complying with ISO-26262.
Supporting RISC-V, SmartDV Technologies has released verification IP for RISC-V-based systems. The IP is compliant with standard TileLink specifications and the company says it offers “faster testbench development, more complete verification with built- in coverage analysis and simplified results analysis.”
 
To read more, please visit: https://semiengineering.com/week-in-review-design-low-power-29/.