Accellera updates portable stimulus standard

Accellera Systems Initiative’s board of directors has approved the version 2.1 of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) 2.1, with updates intended to improve breadth of modeling and usability.

The update to the standard focuses on modeling and usability, with the introduction of many significant features aimed at enhancing its capabilities for efficient hardware and software verification.

PSS was devised to make it possible for development teams to create a single representation of stimulus and test scenarios that can be used at different levels of integration and configurations. Additions to the latest release include support for floating-point datatypes and math functions based on them as well as features for modeling memory management and address translation and more flexible techniques for generating random data during tests.

“Industry adoption of the PSS standard continues to rise across the globe as new features are added to help increase productivity,” said Accellera chair Lu Dai.

PSS 2.1 also simplifies the description of common modeling tasks, such as accessing individual register fields, handling conditional compilation, and controlling how actions affect activity regions.