Simon Davidmann President & CEO of Imperas Software elected as Chair of the OpenHW Verification Task Group

Imperas leadership in the RISC-V Verification Ecosystem recognized in the expanded OpenHW Verification Task Group charter to lead the RISC-V community in adapting to the challenges of RISC-V processor verification

Oxford, United Kingdom – December 12, 2022 – Imperas Software Ltd., the leader in RISC-V simulation solutions, today announced that Simon Davidmann has been elected as Chair of the OpenHW Verification Task Group (VTG) with an expanded charter to drive the developing verification infrastructure and methodologies applicable to all RISC-V adopters.

The OpenHW group was founded on the premise that to enable the broad adoption of open-source hardware IP requires high-quality industrial-grade verification. Following the first CORE-V processor released with industrial strength verification, the CV32E40P, the CORE-V roadmap of new cores requires improvements in verification productivity, including the reuse of the verification IP and infrastructure. Under the new leadership, these improvements in standards and methodologies will be available to all developers working with open-source or commercial RISC-V implementations.

Davidmann has extensive experience in the verification world. He was a key contributor to SystemVerilog, one of the key components of design verification. In 1997, he co-founded Co-Design Automation Inc., with Peter Flake, to design and implement a new language and simulator. Their work, along with Verilog’s developer, the late Phil Moorby, led to a single language for system specification, hardware design, hardware verification, and software development. That language became SystemVerilog, which was adopted by Accellera and became an IEEE standard.

“Fundamental to the OpenHW CORE-V open-source processor family is high-quality verification that has been achieved with the help and support of the dedicated OpenHW members and contributors,” said Rick O’Connor, President & CEO OpenHW Group. “I am excited that Simon is lending his verification expertise and vision to expand the scope of the OpenHW Verification Task Group to address industry-wide standards and methodologies for all RISC-V adopters.”

Fully verified open-source cores

The high-quality CV32E40P open-source processor IP core was the first core to be fully verified within the OpenHW CORE-V family. This marked the first of many projects based on the CV32E40P, which was verified using the Imperas RISC-V golden reference model, now a key component relied upon in development and verification both within open-source community projects and commercial designs. Imperas is a founding member of the OpenHW Group, which was established with a clear objective to drive the adoption of open-source hardware by delivering quality IP cores based on industrial strength verification and compatibility with the established commercial EDA design tools and flows.

“The semiconductor industry is built on standards, but it is the methodologies that provide the essential guidelines that support both successful projects and the foundation of the supporting ecosystem alike,” said Simon Davidmann, CEO at Imperas Software Ltd, and Chair of the OpenHW Verification Task Group.

He noted that the open standard instruction-set architecture (ISA) of RISC-V is enabling SoC and system developers to explore new design freedoms and new solutions. Verification responsibility is undergoing a major shift from a few specialist teams to any developer who explores a RISC-V design.

“The RISC-V verification ecosystem needs to adapt and support the challenge in this step-change in complexity and scale,” Davidmann continued. “With the member-based collaboration and infrastructure, OpenHW provides the essential framework to develop and adopt new standards and methodologies for verification of all RISC-V implementations both open-source and commercial.”

About the OpenHW Verification Task Group

The OpenHW Group is a not-for-profit, global organization driven by its members and individual contributors where hardware and software designers collaborate in the development of open-source cores, related IP, tools, and software. The OpenHW Verification Task Group has the mandate to develop best-in-class verification test bench environments for the cores and IP blocks developed within the OpenHW Group. This is in addition to the dual goal of developing verification infrastructure and methodologies applicable to all RISC-V adopters developing both open-source and commercial implementations. For more information, please visit https://www.openhwgroup.org

RISC-V Summit 2022

Imperas along with OpenHW Group are proud to be contributing sponsors for the fifth annual RISC-V Summit, December 12-15 2022 in San Jose, California. Imperas will showcase solutions for RISC-V processor verification, custom instruction design flows, and software development, including a keynote on RISC-V Processor verification plus many other activities. OpenHW Group will showcase demos and presentations from their current projects within the OpenHW Technical Working Group. For more information, please visit RISC-V Summit 2022.

About Imperas

Imperas is the leading provider of RISC-V processor models, hardware design verification solutions, and virtual prototypes for software simulation. Imperas, along with Open Virtual Platforms (OVP), promotes open-source model availability for a spectrum of processors, IP vendors, CPU architectures, system IP and reference platform models of processors and systems ranging from simple single core bare metal platforms to full heterogeneous multicore systems booting SMP Linux. All models are available from Imperas at www.imperas.com and the Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) website at www.OVPworld.org.