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During the development of a mid-range complexity RISC-V processor, you can discover hundreds or even thousands of bugs. As you introduce more advanced features, you inadvertently introduce new bugs that vary in complexity. Certain types of bugs are just too complex for simulation to find them. You must therefore augment your RTL verification methods. How do you do that? By adding formal verification. From corner cases to hidden bugs, it allows you to exhaustively explore all states within a reasonable amount of processing time. Let’s have a look in this blog post at how we can raise the quality of RISC-V processors with formal verification.

Why use formal verification for RISC-V?

RISC-V is a modular instruction set architecture for which an architectural test suite can be developed. It is used in simulation-based verification to verify a processor implementation. Similarly, formal methods can be used to verify the architectural compliance of a processor. Why? Because RISC-V is an open standard that everyone can use as a reference model to formally verify an implementation.

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