The semiconductor design industry has always preferred evolution over revolution. There have been a few successful revolutions but most of the time revolution happens over time through evolutionary steps. (more…)
The Breker Trekker
Posts Tagged ‘portable stimulus’
Rewriting Revolutionary History
Friday, June 9th, 2017Total Value Of A Standard
Monday, May 22nd, 2017The creation of the Portable Stimulus standard has raised a number of issues about the tradeoffs between using an industry standard language and a domain-specific language. Several blogs have tried to make the case for one or the other and often use scare tactics to make one look better than the other. That is not the objective of this blog. Instead, it’s meant to provide some information as to why the inclusion of the C++ variant is a good thing for the industry. (more…)
Portable Stimulus – The First Verification Model
Tuesday, April 4th, 2017When people think about design languages, they may not realize that the language is almost irrelevant. The language supports the underlying semantic model and it is this model that is important. EDA has defined design models at the gate level, the register transfer level (RTL) and various forms of behavioral levels. When we talk about RTL, we think about Verilog and VHDL, but they are only the languages that support that model, or very minor variations of it. But what about verification? (more…)
Users Talk Back on Portable Stimulus
Friday, March 17th, 2017At the recent DVCon, I had the pleasure to moderate a panel that enabled users to talk about their experiences working with the Accellera standard’s body during the creation of the Portable Stimulus standard. I would like to thank Accellera for enabling such a panel and to Nanette Collins for organizing the panel and making sure that I had the easiest role in the ensuing discussion. I am sure that full write-ups of the panel will emerge, but I wanted to make the voice of the users heard. (more…)
Portable Stimulus Takes Center Stage At DVCon 2017
Thursday, February 23rd, 2017When DVCon opens next week, attendees will hear plenty of talk about Portable Stimulus, a methodology and technology that’s grabbing industry attention and gaining momentum with the design verification community. In fact, I predict it will be the buzz of the conference this year.
EDA Hates C++. Wait, What – Back Up!
Friday, November 4th, 2016Why is Accellera supporting the use of an industry standard language in the development of the Portable Stimulus Standard? (more…)
The Next Wave in Verification
Thursday, September 29th, 2016There is an important standard being worked on within Accellera and given its name, you might think that this is another incremental standard on a somewhat tired theme. It is called Portable Stimulus and yet it has almost nothing to do with stimulus and that stimulus, once generated by a tool not defined in the standard, is most certainly not portable. It is a fundamentally new approach to verification that could transform how chips and low-level software are verified. We will get back to the name in a moment, but the important thing is that users become informed about this new language and choose to have their voices heard in the standardization effort.
User Victory in Portable Stimulus
Thursday, September 8th, 2016As regular readers know, the Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) of the Accellera System Initiative has been working for some time to develop a new way to define verification intent once and to be able to reuse that across all stages of the verification flow and to be able to reuse it across designs. This will dramatically increase verification efficiency and establish verification methodologies that are likely to be used for the next couple of decades. (more…)
Hitting the Town with DVClub
Thursday, September 1st, 2016For those unfamiliar with the idiom, “hitting the town” or “going out on the town” means heading out to make the rounds of bars, restaurants, theaters, clubs, etc. It’s usually used in a city where such entertainment options abound. The topic of today’s post on The Breker Trekker blog is a particular club, DVClub, that packs in plenty of solid technical information along with entertainment. You may not have to go far to hit one; a DVClub event is likely to be coming to your city soon.
The history of the Design Verification Club (DVClub) is quite interesting, stretching back more than ten years. It started as an informal event for verification engineers to get together to share stories and talk about new technologies to help them do their jobs. You might have noticed that, unlike DVCon, the title means “design verification” and not “design and verification.” This gathering is intended for semiconductor functional verification engineers.
A Further Preview of DVCon India 2016
Wednesday, August 24th, 2016Three weeks ago, we published a post on The Breker Trekker blog that previewed some of the talks and tutorials on the technical program at the upcoming third Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) India on September 15-16 in Bangalore. More of the details on the conference are now available online, and for today we’d like to highlight some of the keynote addresses, panels, and poster sessions on the agenda that also stand out for us.
As always, the program and steering committees have put a lot of thought into keynote speakers who will take a wide view of not just the EDA industry, but the larger electronics industry that we serve. Mentor CEO Wally Rhines is always a great speaker who comes armed with lots of charts and statistics to support his positions. His talk on “Design Verification: Challenging Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” will survey the history and evolution of verification while predicting some of the future challenges
