Semiconductor Engineering Article: The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance

The open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) continues to gain momentum, but the flexibility of RISC-V creates a problem—how do you know if a RISC-V implementation fits basic standards and can play well with other implementations so they all can run the same ecosystem? In addition, how do you ensure that ecosystem development works for all implementations and that all cores that claim to be RISC-V have implemented the specification correctly?
RISC-V chip developers need to delve into conformance testing. The good news is the RISC-V Compliance framework is being developed to ensure that a product claiming to be a RISC-V core will run a common set of applications, tools and system software. But conformance testing skills in each EDA team will need to be developed.
 
To read more, please visit: https://semiengineering.com/toward-risc-v-compliance/.