Press Releases

Accellera Board Approves Portable Test and Stimulus Standard 2.0

Elk Grove, Calif., April 14, 2021 -- 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 the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard 2.0. 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 scenarios 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 intent once and observe consistent behavior across multiple implementations.

“Accellera is excited to bring more productivity to the system-level design and verification community with the immediate availability of PSS 2.0,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera Chair. “Industry input was tremendously beneficial to shape and guide the advancement of the standard.  We look forward to broad industry adoption as it becomes an integral part of design and verification flows.”

Additions to Portable Test and Stimulus 2.0:
A public review of the Portable Test and Stimulus Draft Standard 2.0 was conducted at the end of last year to gain feedback from the community on the major additions to the standard. New major features improve the usability of the PSS 2.0 standard and expand its portability and flexibility to a broader class of verification challenges.

Additions to the 2.0 standard include several new language features:

  • Core library for standard portable functionality and utilities for common PSS applications, including register accesses and memory allocation and management
  • Core library for mapping scenario elements to execution agents in the target implementation
  • Collection types, including arrays, lists, maps, and sets
  • Parameterized types
  • Constraint enhancements, including default constraints and propagation
  • Enhanced activity-level generation and scheduling constructs
  • Improved portability of procedural constructs for test realization
  • Clarified rules for name resolution and conditional code processing for compilation

“The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard continues to enjoy great participation from design companies and committed support from a broad set of EDA suppliers.  We are grateful for the significant volunteer contributions and proud of the mature capabilities the working group members produced in 2.0 while operating in a global pandemic environment.” stated Faris Khundakjie, Chair of the Portable Stimulus Working Group. “We are hopeful the user community will enjoy leaps of flexibility and practical applications with the newly added features.  As always we continue to encourage our user community to influence this standard to foster continued success and adoption.”

Release notes stating the differences between the 1.0a and 2.0 standard can be found here.

How to provide feedback on PSS 2.0:
The Portable Stimulus Working Group encourages the community to provide feedback on the new version of the standard. Feedback can be provided through Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Community Forum.

More information and Background on Portable Stimulus:
Accellera has resources available to learn more about Portable Stimulus and how it can positively impact your design and verification methodology. For more information, visit the Portable Stimulus Working Group page.

Join Accellera to help influence the ongoing development of the standard; more information can be found on the website.

About Accellera
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 and LinkedIn or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence, Siemens EDA, and Synopsys.


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