BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.

Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy technology, and data centers.

The global chip manufacturing industry is projected to boost capacity by 6% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, reaching 33.7 million 8-inch (200mm) wafers per month, according to SEMI‘s latest World Fab Forecast report. Leading-edge capacity for 5nm nodes and below is expected to grow by 13% in 2024, driven by AI demand for data center applications. Additionally, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC will begin producing 2nm chips using gate-all-around (GAA) FETs next year, boosting leading-edge capacity by 17% in 2025.

At the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, imec introduced:

• Functional CMOS-based CFETs with stacked bottom and top source/drain contacts.
• CMOS-based 56Gb/s zero-IF D-band beamforming transmitters to support next-gen short-range, high-speed wireless services at frequencies above 100GHz.
• ADCs for base stations and handsets, a key step toward scalable, high-performance beyond-5G solutions, such as cloud-based AI and extended reality apps.

Quick links to more news:

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In-Depth
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Global

Wolfspeed postponed plans to construct a $3 billion chip plant in Germany, underscoring the EU‘s challenges in boosting semiconductor production, reports Reuters. The North Carolina-based company cited reduced capital spending due to a weakened EV market, saying it now aims to start construction in mid-2025, two years later than 0riginally planned.

Micron is building a pilot production line for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in the U.S., and considering HBM production in Malaysia to meet growing AI demand, according to a Nikkei report. The company is expanding HBM R&D facilities in Boise, Idaho, and eyeing production capacity in Malaysia, while also enhancing its largest HBM facility in Taichung, Taiwan.

Kioxia restored its Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants in Japan to full capacity, ending production cuts as the memory market recovers, according to Nikkei. The company, which is focusing on NAND flash production, has secured new bank credit support, including refinancing a ¥540 billion loan and establishing a ¥210 billion credit line. Kioxia had reduced output by more than 30% in October 2022 due to weak smartphone demand.

Europe’s NATO Innovation Fund announced its first direct investments, which includes semiconductor materials. Twenty-three NATO allies co-invested in this over $1B fund devoted to address critical defense and security challenges.

The second meeting of the U.S.–India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) was held in New Delhi, with various funding and initiatives announced to support semiconductor technology, next-gen telecommunications, connected and autonomous vehicles, ML, and more.

Amazon announced investments of €10 billion in Germany to drive innovation and support the expansion of its logistics network and cloud infrastructure.

Quantum Machines opened the Israeli Quantum Computing Center (IQCC) research facility, backed by the Israel Innovation Authority and located at Tel Aviv University. Also, Israel-based Classiq is collaborating with NVIDIA and BMW, using quantum computing to find the optimal automotive architecture of electrical and mechanical systems.

Global data center vacancy rates are at historic lows, and power availability is becoming less available, according to a Siemens report featured on Broadband Breakfast. The company called for an influx of financing to find new ways to optimize data center technology and sustainability.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Single Vs. Multi-Patterning Advancements For EUV
• Precise Control Of Copper Plating And CMP
• Ruthenium Interconnects On Tap
• Opportunities Grow For GPU Acceleration

More reporting this week:

• IC Industry’s Growing Role In Sustainability
• What’s Missing In Test

Market Reports

Renesas completed its acquisition of Transphorm and will immediately start offering GaN-based power products and reference designs to meet the demand for wide-bandgap (WBG) chips.

Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment (WFE) companies fell 9% YoY in Q1 2024, according to Counterpoint. This was offset partially by increased demand for NAND and DRAM, which increased 33% YoY, and strong growth in sales to China, which were up 116% YoY.

The SiC power devices industry saw robust growth in 2023, primarily driven by the BEV market, according to TrendForce. The top five suppliers, led by ST with a 32.6% market share and onsemi in second place, accounted for 91.9% of total revenue. However, the anticipated slowdown in BEV sales and weakening industrial demand are expected to significantly decelerate revenue growth in 2024. 

About 30% of vehicles produced globally will have E/E architectures with zonal controllers by 2032, according to McKinsey & Co. The market for automotive micro-components and logic semiconductors is predicted to reach $60 billion in 2032, and the overall automotive semiconductor market is expected to grow from $60 billion to $140 billion in the same period, at a 10% CAGR.

The automotive processor market generated US$20 billion in revenue in 2023, according to Yole. US$7.8 billion was from APUs and FPGAs and $12.2 billion was from MCUs. The ADAS and infotainment processors market was worth US$7.8 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $16.4 billion by 2029 at a 13% CAGR. The market for ADAS sensing is expected to grow at a 7% CAGR.

Security

The CHERI Alliance was established to drive adoption of memory safety and scalable software compartmentalization via the security technology CHERI, or Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions. Founding members include Capabilities Limited, Codasip, the FreeBSD Foundation, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, and the University of Cambridge.

In security research:

• Japan and China researchers explored a NAND-XOR ring oscillator structure to design an entropy source architecture for a true random number generator (TRNG).
• University of Toronto and Carleton University researchers presented a survey examining how hardware is applied to achieve security and how reported attacks have exploited certain defects in hardware.
• University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University researchers explored the potential of hardware security primitive Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) for mitigation of visual deepfakes.
• Villanova University researchers proposed the Boolean DERIVativE attack, which generalizes Boolean domain leakage.

Post-quantum cryptography firm PQShield raised $37 million in Series B funding.

Former OpenAI executive, Ilya Sutskever, who quit over safety concerns, launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI).

EU industry groups warned the European Commission that its proposed cybersecurity certification scheme (EUCS) for cloud services should not discriminate against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, reported Reuters.

Cyber Europe tested EU cyber preparedness in the energy sector by simulating a series of large-scale cyber incidents in an exercise organized by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Education and Training

New York non-profit NY CREATES and South Korea’s National Nano Fab Center partnered to develop a hub for joint research, aligned technology services, testbed support, and an engineer exchange program to bolster chips-centered R&D, workforce development, and each nation’s high-tech ecosystem.

New York and the Netherlands agreed on a partnership to promote sustainability within the semiconductor industry, enhance workforce development, and boost semiconductor R&D.

Rapidus is set to send 200 engineers to AI chip developer Tenstorrent in the U.S. for training over the next five years, reports Nikkei. This initiative, led by Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC), aims to bolster Japan’s AI chip industry.

Product News

UMC announced its 22nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology platform for premium smartphone and mobile device displays. The 22eHV platform reduces core device power consumption by up to 30% compared to previous 28nm processes. Die area is reduced by 10% with the industry’s smallest SRAM bit cells.​

Alphawave Semi announced a new 9.2 Gbps HBM3E sub-system silicon platform capable of 1.2 terabytes per second. Based on the HBM3E IP, the sub-system is aimed at addressing the demand for ultra-high-speed connectivity in high-performance compute applications.

Movellus introduced the Aeonic Power product family for on-die voltage regulation, targeting the challenging area of power delivery.

Cadence partnered with Semiwise and sureCore to develop new cryogenic CMOS circuits with possible quantum computing applications. The circuits are based on modified transistors found in the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform and are capable of processing analog, mixed-signal, and digital circuit simulation and verification at cryogenic temperatures.

Renesas launched R-Car Open Access (RoX), an integrated development platform for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), designed for Renesas R-Car SoCs and MCUs with tools for deployment of AI applications, reducing complexity and saving time and money for car OEMs and Tier 1s.

Infineon released industry-first radiation-hardened 1 and 2 Mb parallel interface ferroelectric-RAM (F-RAM) nonvolatile memory devices, with up to 120 years of data retention at 85-degree Celsius, along with random access and full memory write at bus speeds. Plus, a CoolGaN Transistor 700 V G4 product family for efficient power conversion up to 700 V, ideal for consumer chargers and notebook adapters, data center power supplies, renewable energy inverters, and more.

Ansys adopted NVIDIA’s Omniverse application programming interfaces for its multi-die chip designers. Those APIs will be used for 5G/6G, IoT, AI/ML, cloud computing, and autonomous vehicle applications. The company also announced ConceptEV, an SaaS solution for automotive concept design for EVs.

Fig. 1: Field visualization of 3D-IC with Omniverse. Source: Ansys

QP Technologies announced a new dicing saw for its manufacturing line that can process a full cassette of 300mm wafers 7% faster than existing tools, improving throughput and productivity.

NXP introduced its SAF9xxx of audio DSPs to support the demand for AI-based audio in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by using Cadence’s Tensilica HiFi 5 DSPs combined with dedicated neural-network engines and hardware-based accelerators.

Avionyx, a provider of software lifecycle engineering in the aerospace and safety-critical systems sector, partnered with Siemens and will leverage its Polarion application lifecycle management (ALM) tool. Also, Dovetail Electric Aviation adopted Siemens Xcelerator to support sustainable aviation.

Research

Researchers from imec and KU Leuven released a +70 page paper “Selecting Alternative Metals for Advanced Interconnects,” addressing interconnect resistance and reliability.

A comprehensive review article — “Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities” — was created by a team of experts from the University of Maryland, Lam Research, IBM, Intel, and many others.

Researchers from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris’s Laboratory of Condensed Matter for Physics developed an approach to investigate defects in semiconductors. The team “determined the spin-dependent electronic structure linked to defects in the arrangement of semiconductor atoms,” the first time this structure has been measured, according to a release.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory-led researchers developed a small enclosed chamber that can hold all the components of an electrochemical reaction, which can be paired with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to generate precise views of a reaction at atomic scale, and can be frozen to stop the reaction at specific time points. They used the technique to study a copper catalyst.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved a clinical trial to test a device with 1,024 nanoscale sensors that records brain activity during surgery, developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego).

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Sipeed’s LM4A compute module is a small board with a T-Head TH1520 RISC-V processor, an NPU with up to 4 TOPS of AI performance, and support for up to 16GB of LPDDR4X memory and 128GB of eMMC storage. But what really makes this computer-on-a-module interesting is that Sipeed has designed an ecosystem of products that […]

The post Sipeed Lichee Book 4A is a cheap RISC-V laptop with an upgradeable processor module appeared first on Liliputing.

Framework’s laptops feature mainboards that are designed to removed and replaced, making repairs and upgrades easy. But that design also makes it possible to take a laptop that originally shipped with an Intel chip, for example, and swap out the motherboard for one with an AMD processor. Soon you’ll also be able to add a RISC-V […]

The post Framework introduces a RISC-V mainboard for its modular laptops appeared first on Liliputing.

Two laptops with RISC-V processors developed by Chinese company SpacemiT are now available. The MUSE BOOK was first unveiled in April and is now available from ARACE for $299 and up, while the DC-ROMA II was introduced just last week, and is now available from Deep Computing for $399 and up. Both are 14 inch laptops […]

The post RISC-V laptops: $299 MUSE Book and $399 DC ROMA II with SpacemiT processors are now available appeared first on Liliputing.

A new technical paper titled “xTern: Energy-Efficient Ternary Neural Network Inference on RISC-V-Based Edge Systems” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich and Universita di Bologna.

Abstract
“Ternary neural networks (TNNs) offer a superior accuracy-energy trade-off compared to binary neural networks. However, until now, they have required specialized accelerators to realize their efficiency potential, which has hindered widespread adoption. To address this, we present xTern, a lightweight extension of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) targeted at accelerating TNN inference on general-purpose cores. To complement the ISA extension, we developed a set of optimized kernels leveraging xTern, achieving 67% higher throughput than their 2-bit equivalents. Power consumption is only marginally increased by 5.2%, resulting in an energy efficiency improvement by 57.1%. We demonstrate that the proposed xTern extension, integrated into an octa-core compute cluster, incurs a minimal silicon area overhead of 0.9% with no impact on timing. In end-to-end benchmarks, we demonstrate that xTern enables the deployment of TNNs achieving up to 1.6 percentage points higher CIFAR-10 classification accuracy than 2-bit networks at equal inference latency. Our results show that xTern enables RISC-V-based ultra-low-power edge AI platforms to benefit from the efficiency potential of TNNs.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024.

Rutishauser, Georg, Joan Mihali, Moritz Scherer, and Luca Benini. “xTern: Energy-Efficient Ternary Neural Network Inference on RISC-V-Based Edge Systems.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19065 (2024).

The post Efficient TNN Inference on RISC-V Processing Cores With Minimal HW Overhead appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Earlier this year Chinese chip maker SpacemiT announced plans to launch several new products powered by the company’s RISC-V processors, including the SpacemiT Muse Book laptop, Muse Box mini PC, and MUSE Pi single-board computer (SBC). Now the Muse Pi is available for purchase for $199 from DeepComputing… although I suspect that you may be […]

The post SpacemiT Muse Pi is a single-board PC with SpacemiT M1 8-core RISC-V processor appeared first on Liliputing.

The Milk-V Meles is a Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer with a similar credit card-sized design featuring a decent number of full-sized ports as well as a 40-pin GPIO connector and MIPI-CSI and MIPI-DSIC connectors. But while Raspberry Pi’s little computers feature ARM-based processors, the Milk-V Meles is powered by a quad-core RISC-V processor. First announced last […]

The post Milk-V Meles RISC-V single-board computer is now available for $80 appeared first on Liliputing.

A technical paper titled “Using Formal Verification to Evaluate Single Event Upsets in a RISC-V Core” was published by researchers at University of Southampton.

Abstract:

“Reliability has been a major concern in embedded systems. Higher transistor density and lower voltage supply increase the vulnerability of embedded systems to soft errors. A Single Event Upset (SEU), which is also called a soft error, can reverse a bit in a sequential element, resulting in a system failure. Simulation-based fault injection has been widely used to evaluate reliability, as suggested by ISO26262. However, it is practically impossible to test all faults for a complex design. Random fault injection is a compromise that reduces accuracy and fault coverage. Formal verification is an alternative approach. In this paper, we use formal verification, in the form of model checking, to evaluate the hardware reliability of a RISC-V Ibex Core in the presence of soft errors. Backward tracing is performed to identify and categorize faults according to their effects (no effect, Silent Data Corruption, crashes, and hangs). By using formal verification, the entire state space and fault list can be exhaustively explored. It is found that misaligned instructions can amplify fault effects. It is also found that some bits are more vulnerable to SEUs than others. In general, most of the bits in the Ibex Core are vulnerable to Silent Data Corruption, and the second pipeline stage is more vulnerable to Silent Data Corruption than the first.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024 (preprint).

Xue, Bing, and Mark Zwolinski. “Using Formal Verification to Evaluate Single Event Upsets in a RISC-V Core.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12089 (2024).

Related Reading
Formal Verification’s Usefulness Widens
Demand for IC reliability pushes formal into new applications, where complex interactions and security risks are difficult to solve with other tools.
RISC-V Micro-Architectural Verification
Verifying a processor is much more than making sure the instructions work, but the industry is building from a limited knowledge base and few dedicated tools.

The post Using Formal Verification To Evaluate The HW Reliability Of A RISC-V Ibex Core In The Presence Of Soft Errors appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

RISC-V is paving the way for open source to become accepted within the hardware community, creating a level of industry collaboration never seen in the past, while revitalizing the connection between academia and industry.

The big question is whether this arrangement is just a placeholder while the industry re-learns how to develop processors, or whether this processor architecture is something very different. In either case, there is a clear and pressing need for more flexible processor architectures, and at least for now, RISC-V has filled a void.

“RISC-V was born out of academia and has had strong collaboration within universities from day one,” says Loren Hobbs, vice president of product and business development at Bluespec. “This collaboration continues today, with many of the most popular open-source RISC-V processors having come from universities. Organizations such as OpenHW Group and CHIPS Alliance serve a central and critical role in driving the collaboration, which is bi-directional between the academic community and industry.”

Collaboration of this type has not existed with the industrial community in the past. “We are learning from each other,” says Florian Wohlrab, CEO at OpenHW. “We are learning best practices for verification. At the same time, we are learning what things to avoid. It is growing where people say, ‘Yes, I really get benefit from sharing ideas.'”

The need for processor flexibility exists within industry as well as academia. “There is a need within the industry for diversification on the processor front,” says Neil Hand, director of marketing at Siemens EDA. “In the past, this led to a fragmented set of companies that couldn’t work together. They didn’t see the value of working together. But RISC-V has a cohesive central organization where anyone who wants to get into the processor space can collaborate. They don’t have to expose their secret sauce, but they get to benefit from each other. A rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s really the situation we’re at with RISC-V.”

Longevity
Whether the industry can build upon this success, or whether it fizzles out over time, remains to be seen. But at least for now, RISC-V’s momentum is growing. “We are at the beginning of a revolution in hardware design,” says OpenHW’s Wohlrab. “We saw the same thing for software when Linux came out 20 or so years ago. No one was really thinking about sharing software or collaboratively developing software. There were some small open-source ventures, but working together on a big project took a long time to develop. Now we are all sharing software, all co-working. But for hardware, we’re just at the beginning of this new concept, and a lot of people need to understand that we can do the same for hardware as we did for software.”

Underlying RISC-V’s success is widespread collaboration. “One of the pillars sustaining the success of RISC-V is customization that works with the ecosystem and leverages a well-defined process,” says Sergio Marchese, vice president of application engineering at SmartDV. “RISC-V vendors face the challenge of showing how their processor customization capabilities serve an application and demonstrating the complete process on real hardware. Without strategic partnerships, RISC-V vendors must walk a much more challenging, time-consuming, and resource-intensive road.”

That framework is what makes it unique. “RISC-V has formed this framework for collaboration, and it fixes everything,” says Siemens’ Hand. “Now, when a university has a really cool idea for memory tagging in a processor design, they don’t have to build the compilers, they don’t have to build the reference platform. They already exist. Maybe a compiler optimization startup has this great idea for handling code optimization. They don’t have to build the rest of the ecosystem. When a processor IP company has this great idea, they can become focused within this bigger picture. That’s the unique nature of it. It’s not just a processor specification.”

Historically, one of the problems associated with open-source hardware was quality, because finding bugs in silicon is expensive. OpenHW is an important piece of the puzzle. “Why should everyone reinvent the wheel by themselves?” asks Wohlrab. “Why can’t we get the basic building blocks, some basic chips, take some design from academia, which has reasonably good quality, and build on them, verify them together. We are verifying with different tools, making sure we get a high coverage, and then everyone can go off and use them in their own chips for mass production, for volume shipment.”

This benefits companies both large and small. “There are several processor vendors that have switched to RISC-V,” says Hand. “Synopsys has moved to RISC-V. Andes has moved to RISC-V. MIPS has moved to RISC-V. Why? Because they can leverage the whole ecosystem. The downside of it is commoditization, which as a customer is really beneficial because you can delay choosing a processor till later in the design flow. Your early decision is to use the Arm ecosystem or RISC-V, and then you can work through it. That creates an interesting set of dynamics. You can start to create new opportunities for companies that develop and deliver IP, because you can benchmark them, swap them in and out, and see which one works. On the flip side, it makes it awful from a lock-in perspective once you’re in that socket.”

Fragmentation
Of course, there will be some friction in the system. “In the early days of RISC-V there was nearly a 1:1 balance between contributors and consumers of the technology,” says Geir Eide, director, product management for Siemens EDA. “Today there are thousands of RISC-V consumers, but only a small percentage of those will be contributors. There is a risk that there will be a disconnect between them. If, for instance, a particular market or regional segment is growing at a higher pace than others, or other market segments and regions are more conservative, they tend to stick to established solutions longer. That increases the risk that it could lead to fragmentation.”

Is that likely to impact development long term? “We do not believe that RISC-V will become regionally concentrated, although though there may be regional concentrations of focus within the broad set of implementation choices provided by RISC-V,” says Bluespec’s Hobbs. “A prime example of this is the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, creating a regional focus area for high-performance computing using RISC-V. However, while there may be regional focus areas, this does not mean that the RISC-V standard is, or will become, fragmented. In fact, one of the key tenets of the creation and foundation of RISC-V was preventing fragmentation of the ISA, and it continues to be a key function of RISC-V international.”

China may be a different story. “A lot of companies in China are creating RISC-V cores for internal consumption — for political reasons mostly,” says John Min, vice president of customer service at Arteris. “I think China will go 100% RISC-V for embedded, but it’s a one-way street. They will keep leveraging what the Western companies do and enhance it. China will continue sucking all advancements, such as vectorization, or the special domain-specific acceleration enhancements. They will create their own and make it their own internally, but they will give nothing back.”

Such splits have occurred in the past. “Design languages are the most recent example of that,” says Hand. “There was a regional split, and you had Europe focus on VHDL while America went with Verilog. With RISC-V, there will be that regional split where people will go off and do their things regionally. Europe has focused projects, India has theirs, but they’re still doing it within this framework. It’s this realization that everyone benefits. They’re not doing it to benefit the other people. They’re doing it ultimately to save themselves effort, to save themselves cost, but they realize that by doing it in that framework it is a net benefit to everyone.”

Bi-directionality
An important element is that everyone benefits, and that has to stretch across the academic/commercial boundary. “RISC-V has propelled a new degree of collaboration between academia and commercial organizations,” says Dave Kelf, CEO at Breker. “It’s noticeable that institutions such as Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, to name two, have produced advanced processor designs as a teaching aid, and have collaborated with multiple companies on their verification and design. This has been further advanced by OpenHW Group, which has made these designs accessible to the industry. This bi-directional collaboration benefits the tool providers to further enhance their offerings working on advanced, open devices, while also enabling academia to improve their designs to a commercial quality level. The virtuous circle created is essential if we are to see RISC-V established as a mainstream, industry-wide capability.”

Academia has a lot to offer in hardware advancement. “Researchers in universities are developing innovative new software and hardware to push the limits of RISC-V innovation,” says Dave Miller, head of corporate communications at SiFive. “Many of the RISC-V projects in academia are focused on optimizing performance and energy efficiency for AI workloads, and are open source so the entire ecosystem can benefit. Researchers are also actively contributing to RISC-V working groups to share their knowledge and collaborate with industry participants. These working groups are split evenly between representatives from APAC, Europe, and North America, all working together towards common goals.”

In many cases, industry is willing to fund such projects. “It makes it easy to have research topics that don’t need to boil the ocean,” says Hand. “If you’re a PhD student and you have a great idea, you can go do it. It’s easy for an industry partner to say, ‘I’ll sponsor that. That’s an interesting thing, and I am not required to allocate ridiculous amounts of money into an open-ended project. It’s like I can see the connection of how that research will go into a commercial product later.'”

This feeds back into academia. “The academics have been jumping on board with OpenHW,” says Wohlrab. “By taking their cores and productizing them, they get a chip back that could be shipped in high volume. Then they can do their research on a real commercial product and can see if their idea would fly in real life. They get real numbers and can see real figures for the benefits of a new branch predictor.”

It can also have a long-term benefit for tools. “There are areas where they want to collaborate with us, especially around security,” says Kiran Vittal, executive director for alliances marketing management at Synopsys. “They are building RISC-V based sub-systems using open-source RISC-V processors, and then academia wants to look at not only the AI part, but the security part. There are post-doc students or PhD students looking into using our tools to verify or to implement whatever they’re doing on security.”

That provides an incentive for EDA to offer better tools for use in universities. “Although there has always been collaboration between universities and the industry, where industry provides the universities with access to EDA tools, IP cores, etc., there’s often a bit of a lag,” says Siemens’ Eide. “In many situations (especially outside of the core area of a particular project), universities have access to older versions of the commercial solutions. If you for instance look at a new grad’s resume, where you in the past would see references to old tech, now you see a lot of references to relatively sophisticated use of RISC-V.”

Moving Forward
This collaboration needs to keep pushing forward. “We had an initiative to create a standardized interface for accelerators,” says Wohlrab. “RISC-V International standardized how to add custom instructions in the ISA, but there was no standard for the hardware interface. So we built this. It was a cool discussion. There were people from Silicon Labs, people from NXP, people from Thales, plus several startups. They all came together and asked, ‘How can we make it future proof and put the accelerators inside?'”

The application space for RISC-V is changing. “The big inflection point is Linux and Android,” says Arteris’ Min. “Android already has some support, but when both Android and Linux are really supported, it will change the mobile apps processor game. The number of designs will proliferate. The number of high-end designs will explode. It will take the whole industry to enable that because RISC-V companies are not big enough to create this by themselves. All the RISC-V companies are partners, because we enable this high-end design at the processor levels.”

That would deepen the software community’s engagement. “An embedded software developer needs to understand the underlying hardware if they want to run Linux on a RISC-V processor that uses custom instructions/ accelerators,” says Bluespec’s Hobbs. “To develop complex embedded hardware/software systems, both embedded software developers and embedded hardware developments must possess contextual understanding of the interoperability of hardware and software. The developer must understand how the customized processor is leveraging the custom instructions in hardware for Linux to efficiently manage and execute the accelerated workloads.”

This collaboration could reinvigorate research into EDA, as well. “With AI you can build predictive models,” says Hand. “Could that be used to identify the change effects from making an extension? What does that mean? There’s a cloud of influence — not directly gate-wise, because that immediately explodes — but perhaps based on test suites. ‘I know that something that touches that logic touches this downstream, which touches the rest of the design.’ That’s where AI plays a big role, and it is one of the interesting areas because in verification there are so many unknowns. When AI comes along, any guidance or any visibility that you can give is incredibly powerful. Even if it is not right 100% of the time, that’s okay, as long as it generates false negatives and not false positives.”

There is a great opportunity for EDA companies. “We collaborate with many of the open-source providers, with OpenHW group, with ETH in Zurich,” says Synopsys’ Vittal. “We want to promote our solutions when it comes to any processor design and you need standard tools like synthesis, place and route, simulation. But then there are also other kinds of unique solutions because RISC-V is so customizable, you can build your own custom instructions. You need something specific to verify these custom instructions and that’s why the Imperas golden models are important. We also collaborated with Bluespec to develop a verification methodology to take you through functional verification and debug.”

There are still some wrinkles to be worked out for customizations. “RISC-V gives us predictability,” says Hand. “We can create a compliance test suite, give you a processor optimization package if you’re on the implementation side. We can create analytics and testing solutions because we know what it’s going to look like. But for non-standard processors, it is effectively as a service, because everyone’s processor is a little bit different. The reason you see a lot of focus on the verification, from platform architecture exploration all the way through, is because if you change one little thing, such as an addressing mode, it impacts pretty much 100% of your processor verification. You’ve got to retest the whole processor. Most people aren’t set up like an Arm or an Intel with huge processor verification teams and the infrastructure, and so they need automation to do it for them.”

Conclusion
RISC-V has enabled the industry to create a framework for collaboration, which enables everyone to work together for selfish reasons. It is a symbiotic relationship that continues to build, and it is creating a wider sphere of influence over time.

“It’s unique in the modern era of semiconductor,” says Hand. “You have such a wide degree of collaboration, where you have processor manufacturers, the software industry leaders, EDA companies, all working on a common infrastructure.”

Related Reading
RISC-V Micro-Architectural Verification
Verifying a processor is much more than making sure the instructions work, but the industry is building from a limited knowledge base and few dedicated tools.
RISC-V Wants All Your Cores
It is not enough to want to dominate the world of CPUs. RISC-V has every core in its sights, and it’s starting to take steps to get there.

The post RISC-V Heralds New Era Of Cooperation appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

A technical paper titled “Basilisk: Achieving Competitive Performance with Open EDA Tools on an Open-Source Linux-Capable RISC-V SoC” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich and University of Bologna.

Abstract:

“We introduce Basilisk, an optimized application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation and design flow building on the end-to-end open-source Iguana system-on-chip (SoC). We present enhancements to synthesis tools and logic optimization scripts improving quality of results (QoR), as well as an optimized physical design with an improved power grid and cell placement integration enabling a higher core utilization. The tapeout-ready version of Basilisk implemented in IHP’s open 130 nm technology achieves an operation frequency of 77 MHz (51 logic levels) under typical conditions, a 2.3x improvement compared to the baseline open-source EDA design flow presented in Iguana, and a higher 55% core utilization compared to 50% in the baseline design. Through collaboration with EDA tool developers and domain experts, Basilisk exemplifies a synergistic effort towards competitive open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools for research and industry applications.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024.

Sauter, Phillippe, Thomas Benz, Paul Scheffler, Zerun Jiang, Beat Muheim, Frank K. Gürkaynak, and Luca Benini. “Basilisk: Achieving Competitive Performance with Open EDA Tools on an Open-Source Linux-Capable RISC-V SoC.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.03523 (2024).

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The post Competitive Open-Source EDA Tools appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

A Chinese chip design company called SpacemiT has unveiled a new laptop that will be powered by the company’s K1 processor, which is an octa-core processor that should offer better-than ARM Cortex-A55 performance, support for 4K video, and a 2 TOPS NPU for hardware-accelerated AI features. While the upcoming MUSE Book isn’t the first laptop with […]

The post Lilbits: Another RISC-V laptop, a PCIe connector for the Raspberry Pi 5, and Arc browser comes to Windows 11 appeared first on Liliputing.

A technical paper titled “Fault-Resistant Partitioning of Secure CPUs for System Co-Verification against Faults” was published by researchers at Université Paris-Saclay, Graz University of Technology, lowRISC, University Grenoble Alpes, Thales, and Sorbonne University.

Abstract:

“To assess the robustness of CPU-based systems against fault injection attacks, it is necessary to analyze the consequences of the fault propagation resulting from the intricate interaction between the software and the processor. However, current formal methodologies that combine both hardware and software aspects experience scalability issues, primarily due to the use of bounded verification techniques. This work formalizes the notion of k-fault resistant partitioning as an inductive solution to this fault propagation problem when assessing redundancy-based hardware countermeasures to fault injections. Proven security guarantees can then reduce the remaining hardware attack surface to consider in a combined analysis with the software, enabling a full co-verification methodology. As a result, we formally verify the robustness of the hardware lockstep countermeasure of the OpenTitan secure element to single bit-flip injections. Besides that, we demonstrate that previously intractable problems, such as analyzing the robustness of OpenTitan running a secure boot process, can now be solved by a co-verification methodology that leverages a k-fault resistant partitioning. We also report a potential exploitation of the register file vulnerability in two other software use cases. Finally, we provide a security fix for the register file, verify its robustness, and integrate it into the OpenTitan project.”

Find the technical paper here. Published 2024 (preprint).

Tollec, Simon, Vedad Hadžić, Pascal Nasahl, Mihail Asavoae, Roderick Bloem, Damien Couroussé, Karine Heydemann, Mathieu Jan, and Stefan Mangard. “Fault-Resistant Partitioning of Secure CPUs for System Co-Verification against Faults.” Cryptology ePrint Archive (2024).

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The post K-Fault Resistant Partitioning To Assess Redundancy-Based HW Countermeasures To Fault Injections appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

The first commercial silicon chip that includes open-source, built-in hardware security was announced today by the OpenTitan coalition.

This milestone represents another step in the growth of the open hardware movement. Open hardware has been gaining steam since the development of the popular open-source processor architecture RISC-V.

RISC-V gives an openly available prescription for how a computer can operate efficiently at the most basic level. OpenTitan goes beyond RISC-V’s open-source instruction set by delivering an open-source design for the silicon itself. Although other open-source silicon has been developed, this is the first one to include the design-verification stage and to produce a fully functional commercial chip, the coalition claims.

Utilizing a RISC-V based processor core, the chip, called Earl Grey, includes a number of built-in hardware security and cryptography modules, all working together in a self-contained microprocessor. The project began back in 2019 by a coalition of companies, started by Google and shepherded by the nonprofit lowRISC in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Modeled after open-source software projects, it has been developed by contributors from around the world, both official affiliates with the project and independent coders. Today’s announcement is the culmination of five years of work.

Open source “just takes over because it has certain valuable properties... I think we’re seeing the beginning of this now with silicon.”—Dominic Rizzo, zeroRISC

“This chip is very, very exciting,” says OpenTitan cocreator and CEO of coalition partner zeroRISC Dominic Rizzo. “But there’s a much bigger thing here, which is the development of this whole new type of methodology. Instead of a traditional…command and control style structure, this is distributed.”

The methodology they have developed is called Silicon Commons. Open-source hardware design faces challenges that open-source software didn’t, such as greater costs, a smaller professional community, and inability to supply bug fixes in patches after the product is released, explains lowRISC CEO Gavin Ferris. The Silicon Commons framework provides rules for documentation, predefined interfaces, and quality standards, as well as the governance structure laying out how the different partners make decisions as a collective.

Another key to the success of the project, Ferris says, was picking a problem that all the partners would have an incentive to continue participating in over the course of the five years of development. Hardware security was the right fit for the job because of its commercial importance as well as its particular fit to the open-source model. There’s a notion in cryptography known as Kerckhoffs’s principle, which states that the only thing that should actually be secret in a cryptosystem is the secret key itself. Open-sourcing the entire protocol makes sure the cryptosystem conforms to this rule.

What Is a Hardware Root-of-Trust?

OpenTitan uses a hardware security protocol known as a root of trust (RoT). The idea is to provide an on-chip source of cryptographic keys that is inaccessible remotely. Because it’s otherwise inaccessible, the system can trust that it hasn’t been tampered with, providing a basis to build security on. “Root of Trust means that at the end of the day, there is something that we both believe in,” explains Ravi Subrahmanyan, senior director of integrated circuit design at Analog Devices, who was not involved in the effort. Once there is something both people agree on, a trusted secure connection can be established.

Conventional, proprietary chips can also leverage RoT technology. Open-sourcing it provides an extra layer of trust, proponents argue. Since anyone can inspect and probe the design, the theory is that bugs are more likely to get noticed and the bug fixes can be verified. “The openness is a good thing,” says Subrahmanyan. “Because for example, let’s say a proprietary implementation has some problem. I won’t necessarily know, right? I’m at their mercy as to whether they’re going to tell me or not.”

This kind of on-chip security is especially relevant in devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT), which suffer from unaddressed security challenges. ZeroRISC and its partners will open up sales to IoT markets via an early-access program, and they anticipate broad adoption in that sphere.

Rizzo and Ferris believe their chip has a template for open-source hardware development that other collaborations will replicate. On top of providing transparent security, open-sourcing saves companies money by allowing them to reuse hardware components rather than having to independently develop proprietary versions of the same thing. It also opens the door for many more partners to participate in the effort, including academic institutions such as OpenTitan coalition partner ETH Zurich. Thanks to academic involvement, OpenTitan was able to incorporate cryptography protocols that are safe against future quantum computers.

“Once the methodology has been proven, others will pick it up,” Rizzo says. “If you look at what’s happened with open-source software, first, people thought it was kind of an edge pursuit, and then it ended up running almost every mobile phone. It just takes over because it has certain valuable properties. And so I think we’re seeing the beginning of this now with silicon.”

A technical paper titled “WhisperFuzz: White-Box Fuzzing for Detecting and Locating Timing Vulnerabilities in Processors” was published by researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Texas A&M University, and
Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Abstract:

“Timing vulnerabilities in processors have emerged as a potent threat. As processors are the foundation of any computing system, identifying these flaws is imperative. Recently fuzzing techniques, traditionally used for detecting software vulnerabilities, have shown promising results for uncovering vulnerabilities in large-scale hardware designs, such as processors. Researchers have adapted black-box or grey-box fuzzing to detect timing vulnerabilities in processors. However, they cannot identify the locations or root causes of these timing vulnerabilities, nor do they provide coverage feedback to enable the designer’s confidence in the processor’s security.
To address the deficiencies of the existing fuzzers, we present WhisperFuzz–the first white-box fuzzer with static analysis–aiming to detect and locate timing vulnerabilities in processors and evaluate the coverage of microarchitectural timing behaviors. WhisperFuzz uses the fundamental nature of processors’ timing behaviors, microarchitectural state transitions, to localize timing vulnerabilities. WhisperFuzz automatically extracts microarchitectural state transitions from a processor design at the register-transfer level (RTL) and instruments the design to monitor the state transitions as coverage. Moreover, WhisperFuzz measures the time a design-under-test (DUT) takes to process tests, identifying any minor, abnormal variations that may hint at a timing vulnerability. WhisperFuzz detects 12 new timing vulnerabilities across advanced open-sourced RISC-V processors: BOOM, Rocket Core, and CVA6. Eight of these violate the zero latency requirements of the Zkt extension and are considered serious security vulnerabilities. Moreover, WhisperFuzz also pinpoints the locations of the new and the existing vulnerabilities.”

Find the technical paper here. Published February 2024 (preprint).

Borkar, Pallavi, Chen Chen, Mohamadreza Rostami, Nikhilesh Singh, Rahul Kande, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Chester Rebeiro, and Jeyavijayan Rajendran. “WhisperFuzz: White-Box Fuzzing for Detecting and Locating Timing Vulnerabilities in Processors.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03704 (2024).

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The post White-Box Fuzzer With Static Analysis To Detect And Locate Timing Vulnerabilities In RISC-V Processors  appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.