New 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…)
The Breker Trekker
Posts Tagged ‘Breker’
Improve or Enable
Thursday, April 18th, 2019Interim 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…)
Your Invitation to Verification 3.0 Innovation Summit
Friday, March 8th, 2019Come one, come all to the first event of what we expect will be many –– Verification 3.0 Innovation Summit –– Tuesday, March 19, from 1 p.m. until 8 p.m. at the Levi’s Stadium Team Auditorium in Santa Clara, Calif. (more…)
What Can PSS Do For You? See Breker’s Demos of Trek5’s Capabilities at DVCon
Thursday, February 21st, 2019All of us at Breker invite DVCon attendees to step into our booth (#701) and expect to be amazed. You will see practical demonstrations of our new feature-rich Trek5 with practical examples of how the Portable Stimulus Standard can be applied to accelerate UVM coding for complex blocks and Software Driven Verification (SDV) for large SoCs. (more…)
Portable Stimulus: Finding The Killer App
Thursday, November 29th, 2018Functional verification vendors have been talking a lot about the Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS), but what is it and why should you care? To put it in stark terms – because it is the first language that supports verification methodology and because the existing methodology is failing to provide the capabilities required for system-level verification. (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…)
System 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…)
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…)
Understanding Portable Stimulus Graphs
Wednesday, September 13th, 2017When 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. (more…)
