Dover uses Antmicro's Renode simulator to enable simultaneous hardware and software co-development of its innovative CoreGuard™ security IP
August 31, 2018, Waltham, MA - Edge AI and cyber-physical systems design house Antmicro today announced it has teamed up with innovative semiconductor security IP provider Dover Microsystems. As part of its CoreGuard solution, Dover leverages the unique hardware/software co-design opportunities offered by Antmicro's Renode simulation framework.
With the development of embedded systems becoming ever more challenging, Dover and its customers benefit from the new design methodology enabled by Antmicro's open source Renode framework.
By introducing Renode's functional simulation of heterogeneous computing platforms, Dover's development team and their customers are able to experiment with multiple configurations and perform rapid hardware/software co-design cycles without the need for immediate physical implementation. This enables Dover's customers to have true functional simulation of Dover's CoreGuard cybersecurity IP.
CoreGuard integrates directly with a customer's SoC and includes a software toolchain and runtime software specifically designed to prevent the exploitation of software vulnerabilities. NXP recently announced it will utilize Dover's groundbreaking CoreGuard technology to create inherently secure processors for embedded devices. Antmicro's Renode simulator is included with Dover's CoreGuard development tools.
"Dover is leveraging Renode to drastically reduce our design cycle, rapidly explore architecture trade spaces, and engage in hardware/software co-design. The approach also enables us to provide a simple and effective means for customers to evaluate the entire solution, and to begin adapting their software collateral in parallel with the hardware integration effort," said Marco Ciaffi, Vice President of Engineering at Dover Microsystems.
Michael Gielda, Vice President of Business Development at Antmicro, adds: "We are proud to be partnering with Dover to help build on Renode's flexibility for developing their innovative CoreGuard IP, which - much like Renode - challenges the state of the art with a new, more flexible approach, which will result in detecting and stopping the exploitation of software vulnerabilities much more effectively than purely software-based solutions."
Dover's evaluation platform for CoreGuard, delivered to current and prospective customers worldwide, is built around Renode, which Antmicro extended for Dover to include additional capabilities that enable more fine-grained control over execution and debugging of simulated code. This is a great example of how this flexible and pluggable tool provides the infrastructure to accommodate novel use cases and new design paradigms. The open source nature of Renode combined with Antmicro's commercial support services allows Dover to easily distribute the solution to customers while simultaneously being able to rely on a professional partner for new developments and improvements in Renode itself.
In addition to Dover Microsystems, Renode is already widely used by other RISC‑V Foundation members as well as their customers to simulate RISC‑V based SoCs and cores. The open nature of the ISA is enabling a flexible, collaborative and iterative approach known from open source software to hardware design and development, a goal that is matched by Renode's mission to transfer well-established continuous integration workflows from desktop and datacenter software to embedded systems.
CoreGuard is an ISA agnostic cybersecurity solution, compatible with RISC‑V, Arm, and other architectures. It is the only hardware-based security solution available to the RISC‑V community, and is complementary to other software-based security solutions being developed by other Foundation members. Antmicro and Dover, both RISC‑V Foundation Members, will work together towards making the security and robustness offered by Renode and CoreGuard the leading solution for hardware and embedded system design and development efforts.
About Antmicro
Antmicro is a software-driven tech company developing leading edge cyber-physical and edge AI systems. Antmicro provides open tooling, new development methodologies and applied R&D for customers worldwide, offering assistance in prototyping, new product development and adoption of modern embedded technologies, both in hardware and software. The vast majority of Antmicro's projects include a broad range of open source technologies such as RISC‑V, Renode, ROS, Tensorflow, Zephyr, Linux and Android. For more information visit www.antmicro.com and www.renode.io.
About Dover Microsystems
Dover is the first company to bring real security, privacy, and safety enforcement to silicon. Dover's patented CoreGuard solution integrates with market-leading RISC processors to protect against cyberattacks, flawed software, and safety violations. For more information about the company, please visit www.dovermicrosystems.com.