Author: Yungang Bao https://www.zhihu.com/question/632780730/answer/3331788175

Open source may further have a disruptive impact on chip verification. Generally speaking, chip design source code belongs to the core commercial secrets of a chip company and is never allowed to be leaked. Many companies even place the source code in the red zone, cut off the internet, cannot bring mobile phones, and even add cameras for real-time monitoring. Therefore, to verify the source code of these chip designs, a large number of verification engineers can only be recruited within the company. However, open source chips are completely different, just like all the source code of Xiangshan is publicly available, and anyone can access it anytime, anywhere. Why can’t we mobilize the power of the global open source community to verify together? Therefore, we are beginning to explore crowdsourced verification based on the open source model.

So we launched an open-source chip verification project with the goal of establishing an open-source community like Hugging Face, so that more people can participate in open-source chip verification. To achieve this goal, there will certainly be many challenges, especially compared to the software field, where the developer base in the chip field is several orders of magnitude smaller, and chip verification requires complex simulation environments, among others. Therefore, we have also designed a three-step plan for open-source chip validation to gradually achieve our goals. We are looking forward to the third step, where the open-source community can come together to verify the Xiangshan processor core.

This is our vision for open source chip verification: in the near future, both open source chip designs and commercial chip designs can be submitted to an open source chip verification platform, through which developers from all over the world can participate in verification. This platform supports different languages to participate in verification work, such as Python, Java, Go, and so on. The platform also ensures verification quality through some mechanisms and provides code coverage reports and other information. In this way, the verification mode in the entire chip field will undergo significant changes, software developers can also participate in chip development, and chip companies no longer need to recruit a large number of verification engineers.