The Breker Trekker 
Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
Adnan Hamid is the founder CEO of Breker and the inventor of its core technology. Under his leadership, Breker has come to be a market leader in functional verification technologies for complex systems-on-chips (SoCs), and Portable Stimulus in particular. The Breker expertise in the automation of … More » The Making of a StandardJune 21st, 2018 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
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. Read the rest of The Making of a Standard System Functionality Includes SoftwareApril 23rd, 2018 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
Listening 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. Read the rest of System Functionality Includes Software Industry Struggles with System CoverageMarch 15th, 2018 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
DVCon is a great place to talk to design and verification engineers. As the Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) gets closer to reality, we were able to share with them during the conference the progress made and the ways in which it may impact their task. Most of them are as excited about PSS as we are. While we have been working in this field for more than a decade and have received a lot of feedback, there are now many more people becoming aware of it and the potential that it has. This provides us with the opportunity to learn as well. Read the rest of Industry Struggles with System Coverage UVM is Dead! Long live UVM+PS!February 22nd, 2018 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
When 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. Read the rest of UVM is Dead! Long live UVM+PS! Dual Focus Will Help AdoptionJanuary 31st, 2018 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
One 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. Read the rest of Dual Focus Will Help Adoption Solution = Standard + ToolNovember 30th, 2017 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
Solutions 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. Read the rest of Solution = Standard + Tool Time To Be HeardOctober 2nd, 2017 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
Accellera has just extended the review period for the Portable Stimulus Standard. The committee is now seeking comments up until the end of October. Breker would like to join the committee and say how important it is for users to get involved with this standard. While we, as vendors, have some experience in this area, we are not doing this day in and day out. We need your guidance and feedback. Breker applauds Mark Glasser, principal engineer for NVIDIA, for being a user who is spending the time and effort to understand the emerging Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS). The points he raised in his recent blog are shared by a number of other users in the industry. His passion comes from the fact that he sees the potential of the work that is being undertaken and the impact that it could have on the verification community and the entire system development flow. Users are, by definition, those in the trenches experiencing the problems and trying to find solutions. Within that community, there are only a few that can see beyond the current design and can look towards the future. Of those, only a precious few can help to influence the direction of the future. If you are one of those, then we ask you to get involved. Sitting on a standards committee can be tough and often dirty work, but there is no better way to guide the future direction of the industry. We share Mark’s feelings that we should leverage the extensive expertise that exists in the language design community. It has taken many hundreds of man years of effort to get C++ to where it is today and we have seen, during our interactions with users, the power and flexibility that C++ provides to this problem. Understanding Portable Stimulus GraphsSeptember 13th, 2017 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
When people talk about the Portable Stimulus Standard (“PSS”) they throw around the term “graph based” as if that somehow clarifies everything. They usually don’t bother to describe what it means, beyond it being some simple mathematical model. Some vendors even confuse it with the term “graphical”. To simplify this confusion, for this blog we will use the term “visual”. This blog will answer questions about how PSS relates to graphs and how those graphs relate to other similar graph-based models already used within the industry. Read the rest of Understanding Portable Stimulus Graphs Portable Stimulus Gains MomentumAugust 24th, 2017 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
Next 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. Read the rest of Portable Stimulus Gains Momentum Rewriting Revolutionary HistoryJune 9th, 2017 by Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker
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. Read the rest of Rewriting Revolutionary History |
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