It is unfortunate that design and verification methodologies have often been out of sync with each other, and increasingly so over the past 20 years. The design methodology change that caused one particular divergence was the introduction of design Intellectual Property (IP). IP meant that systems were no longer designed and built in a pseudo top-down manner, but contemplated at a higher level and constructed in a bottom up, ‘lego-like’ manner by choosing appropriate blocks that could implement the necessary functions. (more…)
The Breker Trekker
Posts Tagged ‘Accellera’
Methodology Convergence
Thursday, August 8th, 2019Multi-Dimensional Verification
Tuesday, May 28th, 2019It seems like ancient history now, but in the not so distant past, verification was performed by one tool – simulation; at one point in the flow – completion of RTL; using one language and methodology – SystemVerilog and UVM. That changed when designs continued to get larger and simulators stopped getting fast enough. Additional help became necessary in the form of emulators and formal verification, but that coincided with an increasingly difficult task of creating a stable testbench. It was no longer possible to migrate a design from a simulator to an emulator without doing a considerable amount of work on the testbench. (more…)
Improve or Enable
Thursday, April 18th, 2019New tools, languages, or methodologies can be an improvement over existing ones, or they can be enablers for something different. The recently approved Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) can be either or both. (more…)
Interim Solutions to the Standards Gap
Thursday, March 14th, 2019The point of standards is to bring an industry together, to avoid duplication of effort, and to reduce risks associated with adoption of technology that may lock a user into a single vendor. These are some of the reasons why Breker was glad to see the creation of the Portable Stimulus working group within Accellera and actively participated in it since its inception. We donated technology and invested more time and effort, as a percentage of company size, than any other player. We were also glad to see the release of version 1.0 of the standard at DAC in 2018 – a huge step for the industry.
But was it enough? Some standards are ratified having been developed and refined by a single company and successfully proliferated across an industry, prior to donation to a standards body. Others are designed by committee and therefore run the risk of an unproven body of work captured as a hard to change standard. Sometimes this works well, other times, less so. It is only after the fact that you know if the committee got it right. So far the Portable Stimulus Standard is being tested by a relatively large number of companies with success, but there are still missing elements for a scalable solution. (more…)
Beyond Portable Stimulus 1.0
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018With the release of the 1.0 version of the Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS), the industry now has a solid base on which to build solutions and to ensure that the time and investment made by users to create verification intent models is portable. This should allow them to assess tools and decide which one fits their requirements best and which ones will fulfill their roadmap into the future. Unfortunately, it is not quite as easy as that, because many users have already moved beyond the basics as represented in the standard. (more…)
The Making of a Standard
Thursday, June 21st, 2018The 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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
