Portable stimulus moves to version 2.0

The Accellera board has approved version 2.0 of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) and has made the document available to download for free.

PSS was created to make it easier to create programmable specifications that can be used to drive a range of stimulus and test scenarios across many levels of integration under different configurations. In principle, by using tools that conform to PSS, 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,” said Accellera chair Lu Dai. “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.”

Features were added with the intention of improving the usability of the PSS 2.0 standard and to expand its portability and flexibility. Additions to the 2.0 standard include a number of 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.” said Faris Khundakjie, chair of the portable-stimulus working group.