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OpenTitan Big Number Accelerator (OTBN)

This directory contains the implementation of the OpenTitan Big Number Accelerator (OTBN). OTBN is a coprocessor for asymmetric cryptographic operations like RSA or Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).

See here for documentation on the current version of OTBN; documentation matching the code in this directory can be found in the doc directory.

OTBN is under active development. Please ask questions and report issues through the GitHub issue tracker.

Develop OTBN

Build OTBN software

An assembler, linker and disassembler for OTBN can be found in hw/ip/otbn/util. These are wrappers around a RISC-V GCC and binutils toolchain so one must be available (see the OpenTitan documentation on obtaining a toolchain. For more details about the toolchain, see the user guide).

otbn_as.py and otbn_ld.py can be used to build .elf files for use with simulations. They work work similarly to binutils programs they wrap.

hw/ip/otbn/util/otbn_as.py -o prog_bin/prog.o prog.s
hw/ip/otbn/util/otbn_ld.py -o prog_bin/prog.elf prog_bin/prog.o

Will assemble and link prog.s resulting in prog_bin/prog.elf that can be run directly on the ISS or the standalone RTL simulation.

Work with the ISA

The instruction set is described in machine readable form in data/insns.yml. This is parsed by Python code in util/insn_yaml.py, which runs various basic checks on the data. The binutils-based toolchain described above uses this information. Other users include:

  • util/yaml_to_doc.py: Generates a Markdown snippet which is included in the OTBN specification.

  • dv/rig/otbn-rig: A random instruction generator for OTBN. See dv/rig/README.md for further information.

Run the Python simulator

The quickest way to run an OTBN-only program is to use the Python simulator. First, generate a .elf. file either using the usual build process or by manually running otbn_as.py and otbn_ld.py as shown above. Then, from $REPO_TOP:

$ hw/ip/otbn/dv/otbnsim/standalone.py -t path/to/prog.elf

Run the standalone RTL simulation

A standalone environment to run OTBN alone in Verilator is included. Build it with fusesoc as follows:

fusesoc --cores-root=. run --target=sim --setup --build lowrisc:ip:otbn_top_sim

It includes functionality to set the initial Dmem and Imem contents from a .elf file. The start address is hard coded to 0. Modify the ImemStartAddr parameter in ./dv/verilator/otbn_top_sim.sv to change this. A .elf (see above for build instructions) can be loaded and run as follows:

./build/lowrisc_ip_otbn_top_sim_0.1/sim-verilator/Votbn_top_sim \
  --load-elf=prog_bin/prog.elf

The simulation automatically halts on an ecall instruction and prints the final register values. The ISS is run in parallel and final register and memory state will be cross-checked.

Tracing functionality is available in the Votbn_top_sim binary. To obtain a full .fst wave trace pass the -t flag. To get an instruction level trace pass the --otbn-trace-file=trace.log argument. The instruction trace format is documented in hw/ip/otbn/dv/tracer.

To run several auto-generated binaries against the Verilated RTL, use the script at dv/verilator/run-some.py. For example,

hw/ip/otbn/dv/verilator/run-some.py --size=1500 --count=50 X

will generate and run 50 binaries, each of which will execute up to 1500 instructions when run. The generated binaries, a Verilated model and the output from running them can all be found in the directory called X.

Run the smoke test

A smoke test which exercises some functionality of OTBN can be found, together with its expected outputs (in the form of final register values), in ./hw/ip/otbn/dv/smoke. The test can be run using a script.

hw/ip/otbn/dv/smoke/run_smoke.sh

This will build the standalone simulation, build the smoke test binary, run it and check the results are as expected.

Run the ISS on its own

There are currently two versions of the ISS and they can be found in dv/otbnsim. The easiest to use is dv/otbnsim/standalone.py. This takes an OTBN binary as an ELF file (as produced by the standard linker script for otbn_ld.py) and can dump the resulting DMEM if given the --dmem-dump argument. To see an instruction trace, pass the --verbose flag.

There is also dv/otbnsim/otbnsim.py. This takes flat binary files with the contents of IMEM and DMEM and, when finished, generates a cycle count and dumps DMEM contents. This is used to implement the model inside of simulation, but is probably not very convenient for command-line use otherwise.

Test the ISS

The ISS has a simple test suite, which runs various instructions and makes sure they behave as expected. You can find the tests in dv/otbnsim/test and can run them with make -C dv/otbnsim test.