Key TakeawaysArchitectural conformance and implementation verification are necessary but different for RISC-V designs, yet few verification engineers have experience on the conformance side. Does it have a responsibility to the community when it comes to defining what a RISC-V core is? “Certification is envisioned as a tiny subset of architectural verification, but remains a big and growing problem due to the growing set of extensions. “The core passed all the architectural tests, but three months into software bring-up they discovered their branch predictor had the accuracy of a coin flip. “Formal verification is becoming a more important part of the solution,” says Stevens.