OpenHW TV S03/E05
This episode of OpenHW TV will focus on the verification of the CORE-V-MCU currently under development by the OpenHW Group. Followers of OpenHW TV may recall that the CORE-V-MCU started out its life as the Arnold device (https://bit.ly/3PrfMCb) from the PULP-Platform team at ETH Zürich. Arnold has been successfully implemented in silicon, so a reasonable question is: “Why does the CORE-V-MCU need more verification?”
The answer to this question lies in the goals of the CORE-V-MCU which are to enable rapid deployment of hardware and software development kits and to accelerate the design of commercial SoC devices based on CV32E40P.
Enabling hardware and software dev-kits calls for an accelerated development cycle that puts an SoC (ASIC) implementation of CORE-V-MCU into developers hands as soon as possible. To support this goal, a verification project that employs processor-driven testing is being used. This has enabled rapid deployment of a set of simple C test-programs called “cli-test”, running under FreeRTOS.
To support developers of commercial grade SoC devices requires the same level of verification that has previously been deployed on the CV32E40P core. The CORE-V-MCU-VERIF project aims to deploy a complete UVM verification environment that is capable of fully verifying the MCU as well as future commercial SoC devices based on CV32E4 cores.
The presentation is led by Mike Thompson, OpenHW Group Director of Engineering. Joining Mike are members of the Verification Task Group, Tim Saxe, CTO of QuickLogic David Poulin, President of Datum Technology Corporation.