Early access view of portable-stimulus standard released
Accellera has released an Early Adopter version of the upcoming Portable Stimulus Specification.
The Portable Stimulus Specification defines a standard mechanism for the specification of verification intent and behaviors that would be reusable across target platforms, including virtual platforms, simulation, emulation, and silicon prototypes, and allow for the automation of test generation. It is the result of work performed by the Portable Stimulus Working Group, formed by Accellera at the beginning of 2015. The working group is comprised of 17 user and EDA vendor companies.
“We are very proud of how much the Portable Stimulus Working Group has achieved in the last two years getting the draft standard ready for review,” said Lu Dai, Accellera chair.
“The Early Adopter specification public review is an important milestone for our working group,” added Faris Khundakjie of Intel and chair of the Portable Stimulus Working Group. “The challenges that portable stimulus addresses are critical to improving productivity and quality for modern electronic systems development. This broader audience review and feedback should help produce a higher quality specification for release early next year.”
The Early Adopter specification (free download here) provides a comprehensive explanation of the new Portable Stimulus Domain Specific Language (DSL) and the equivalent C++ class library. This DSL is a declarative language designed for abstract behavioral description based on actions. DSL statements encode inputs, outputs, and resource dependencies for actions and allow them to be assembled into use-cases that include data and control flows.
The use-cases are meant to capture test intent that can be analyzed to produce a wide range of possible legal scenarios for multiple execution platforms, from simulation through to silicon-based prototypes. The Early Adopter specification also includes a preliminary mechanism designed to capture the programmer’s view of a peripheral device, independent of the underlying platform.
The working group will be accepting feedback and comments on the specification until Friday, September 15, 2017 before finalizing the specification for release in early 2018. Readers may provide feedback via Accellera’s new Portable Stimulus Discussion Forum.
The working group will present a tutorial at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas as well as upcoming DVCon conferences around the world, based on a three-part webinar available online. There will also be a Portable Stimulus Town Hall discussion at DAC on Tuesday, June 20 where representatives from user companies will be discussing the Early Adopter release and answering questions.
