The industry waits with bated breath for the Accellera board to approve the Portable Stimulus 1.0 specification. It has been a long and arduous process over the past four years to get to this point, a process that most people never get to experience. This was my first standard, and to say it was an eye opener is somewhat of an understatement. In this blog, I am not going to dwell on the many bruises I suffered or the technical discussions that often seemed like personal attacks. Instead, I want to make the industry aware of some of the difficulties associated with bringing a new and somewhat revolutionary standard to market. (more…)
The Breker Trekker
Posts Tagged ‘portable stimulus’
The Making of a Standard
Thursday, June 21st, 2018System Functionality Includes Software
Monday, April 23rd, 2018Listening to users is never a bad thing. Users are the people who set Breker along its current direction and during the process of standardizing Portable Stimulus (PS), the ability to talk to an expanded group of users allowed Breker to see a larger portion of the total available market. We learned a lot. (more…)
UVM is Dead! Long live UVM+PS!
Thursday, February 22nd, 2018When the forebears of SystemVerilog and UVM were being created, the world was a different place. Verification was primarily directed testing and code coverage was good enough to signal completion. Development of directed tests was getting to be slow, cumbersome and difficult to maintain. Languages and tools were created that added the ability to randomize stimulus but that created two problems. First, you had no idea what a test had accomplished and second, you had no idea that the design had actually reacted in the right manner. Thus, two additional models became necessary: a combination of checkers and scoreboard and the coverage model. The big problem was, and remains, that the three models are independent models only unified by a thin layer of syntax. (more…)
Dual Focus Will Help Adoption
Wednesday, January 31st, 2018One of the great things associated with the development of a standard, such as the Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS), is that it brings together various stakeholders – often a broader selection of people than any single company did business with. When you initially develop a product you gear it toward a particular problem, one that you have some familiarity with. The resulting product attracts engineers who resonate with the product and they provide valuable feedback. This in turn helps to make the product more attractive to engineers with a similar need. If you are not careful, you can have a product that targets a narrow part of the market and that is all you learn to explore. It is the Innovators Dilemma, and can stop a company from developing a general purpose product. (more…)
Solution = Standard + Tool
Thursday, November 30th, 2017Solutions are what users need and the existence of a standard gives them the assurance that models they create will be portable between tools. Put another way, the standard creates a level playing field on which vendors can create tools that provide solutions. (more…)
Portable Stimulus Gains Momentum
Thursday, August 24th, 2017Next month will see a significant milestone for Portable Stimulus. On September 15th the review period for the Early Adopter release of the Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) will close and with it the opportunity to make your voice heard. This is an exciting time for Breker, the market leader in this space for the past decade, and signals a time when the industry can transition from a technology only available to a few aggressive adopters, to making it available to the mainstream. (more…)
Rewriting Revolutionary History
Friday, June 9th, 2017The 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…)
Total 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…)
