Ada and RISC-V Secure Nvidia's Future

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Nvidia is using RISC-V for its security processor, and programming is handled via Ada/SPARK.

electronicdesign.com, Jan. 23, 2020 – 

Nvidia tends to hype the machine-learning (ML) capabilities of its system-on-chip (SoC) solutions like its DRIVE AGX Orin that targets automotive applications. Often lost in the mix is the security processor that is part of the package but these are critical to safe and secure applications.

Nvidia's security support has used a custom processor, but it's moving to RISC-V for future implementations. The company isn't alone in its adoption of RISC-V. Western Digital is taking advantage of SiFive's RISC-V designs across the board for its storage solutions. NVIDIA isn't changing the SoC's core processors at this point. These are still Arm Cortex cores, but the security processor is essentially isolated from the rest of the system and it runs its own firmware.

That firmware will not be written in C though. It is being done in SPARK, a provable subset of the Ada programming language. Ada 2012 added contracts to that language and SPARK takes advantage of this feature. It allows programmers to specify details like the characteristics of procedure inputs and outputs. The compiler can then enforce these rules for calls to the procedure as well as how the results will be used.

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