Press Releases

Accellera Approves New Portable Test and Stimulus Standard

New standard enables users to specify verification intent and behaviors once and use them across multiple implementations and platforms

San Francisco, Calif., June 26, 2018 -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced today that its Board of Directors has approved Portable Test and Stimulus 1.0 as an Accellera standard. The new standard is available immediately to download for free.

The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) defines a specification to create a single representation of stimulus and test scenarios, usable by a variety of users across many levels of integration under different configurations. This representation facilitates the generation of diverse implementations of a scenario that run on a variety of execution platforms, including, but not necessarily limited to, simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, and post-silicon. With this standard, users can specify a set of behaviors once and observe consistent behavior across multiple implementations.

“This is a significant milestone for Accellera,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera Chair. “Our mission is to provide market-relevant industry standards to help improve and increase productivity. The new Portable Test and Stimulus Standard 1.0 will have a profound impact on the industry as a whole as today’s electronic designs have placed a significant burden on system-level verification methods and have slowed overall designer productivity. The ability to use one test specification and have it be portable across multiple platforms is a major advancement for system-level design and verification.”

PSS defines a domain-specific language (DSL) and an accompanying semantically-equivalent C++ class declarations to create a single representation of stimulus and test scenarios usable by a variety of verification, test, and design engineers across different levels of integration under different configurations.  The standard enables consumers of design automation technology to select the best tool(s) from competing suppliers to meet their increasing verification challenges.

PSS concepts leverage object-oriented programming languages, hardware-verification languages, and behavioral modeling languages. PSS features native constructs for system notions, such as data/control flow, concurrency and synchronization, resource requirements, and states and transitions. 

“The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard 1.0 provides tremendous value to the community with increased productivity and quality throughout a product lifecycle,” stated Faris Khundakjie, Chair of the Portable Stimulus Working Group. “I thank the working group for their dedication and hard work to complete the first release of the standard. After three years of development, I am excited to bring the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard 1.0 to market and look forward to widespread adoption by the design and verification community.”

DAC Panel
There will be a panel at the 2018 Design Automation Conference in the IP Track, “Portable Stimulus Design & Verification (R)Evolution” on Wednesday, June 27 at 1:30pm in the Moscone Convention Center, Room 2008. Registration is required with the Design Automation Conference to attend.
Resources

  • Release notes stating the differences between the Early Adopter II release to the 1.0 standard can be found here.
  • For more information about the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard, view the “Portable Test and Stimulus: The Next Level of Verification Productivity is Here” tutorial which was presented by members of the working group at DVCon U.S. 2018.
  • Readers are encouraged to ask questions and interact with the working group via Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Community Forum. Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Community is also a resource for the latest information available on the new standard.

A supporting industry quote sheet is available here.

About Accellera Systems Initiative
Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership. Follow @accellera on Twitter or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence Design Systems, Inc.; Mentor, A Siemens Business; and Synopsys, Inc.


Accellera and Accellera Systems Initiative are trademarks of Accellera Systems Initiative Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.