As generations of designs evolved from a few hundred transistors to hundreds of billions, our industry abstracted the problem space from transistors to schematics to gates, and from RTL bit-level to transaction-level. Using abstraction, designers were able to focus on the high-level design and tests while the tools took care of the automation and calculations at the low-level – this certainly made the design flow more efficient and engineers more productive. Over the years abstraction has allowed the EDA industry to manage the ever-increasing complexity and scale of ASIC/SoC designs.
On a related note, check out Mark Glasser’s blog regarding his perspective on abstraction(while your there check out his great photography too).
The strategy behind the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) is again to raise this level of abstraction to the next level. PSS will enable SoC teams specify stimulus and tests at a high-level. PSS has constructs for modeling high-level test scenarios such as data flow (buffer, streams, states), behavior (actions, activities, components, resource, pooling), constraints, randomization and coverage. The PSS tool generates the downstream code reusable from block, subsystem and system-level, which can be re-targeted for various verification platforms such as simulation, emulation, prototyping or post-silicon validation.
