Entries by Leigh Brady

Inside Portable Stimulus — Hardware Software Interface

This blog series has stuck to what is in the Accellera Portable Stimulus 1.0 standard (PSS), but in this particular blog, we will deviate a bit. We will discuss a capability that did not make it into the first release of the standard, the Hardware Software Interface (HSI). It is a critical capability that now […]

Inside Portable Stimulus: Verification Efficiency

If verification were as hot a topic as artificial intelligence (AI), we would be measuring things like effective verification cycles per watt. Unfortunately, the only things that ever seem to be measured in the verification world are the engines on which simulations are performed. We never actually measure the effectiveness of verification itself, probably because […]

Inside Portable Stimulus –– Maximizing the Emulator

Nobody puts a verification job onto an emulator without first making sure that the testcase is efficient and will make good use of such a valuable resource. In the last blog, we showed how to go from a Portable Stimulus Model and, using testbench synthesis technology, migrate that test from a transactional universal verification methodology […]

Inside Portable Stimulus – Introducing a Processor

So far in this blog series, we have talked about some of the fundamentals of the Accellera Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) and how it can enhance a universal verification methodology (UVM) flow. This is a highly effective strategy for block-level verification and allows for reuse of existing Verification IP (VIP) models. However, as […]

Inside Portable Stimulus: UVM Integration

Integrating Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) capabilities with the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is not the same as an integration between two languages. In our previous column, Aileen Honess provided a backdrop as to why a team using Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and SystemVerilog may want to extend their methodology by adding Portable Stimulus. By incorporating […]

Inside Portable Stimulus: The Exec Block

Atomic actions are capabilities of functional blocks, but how do these things get done? That is the responsibility of the “exec” block. How many times have we heard the old adage “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”? It almost becomes second nature to dismiss new ideas when the gains are […]

Inside Portable Stimulus: Concurrency and Schedules

Once a scenario has been created and executed, it will be possible to see any performance issues that may have been uncovered by the test. This is the second of our blog series looking at the concepts contained within the Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) (see also “Inside Portable Stimulus: Filling in the Blanks”). As […]

Inside Portable Stimulus: Filling in the Blanks

A Portable Stimulus tool can do much of the work and allow many tests to be created based on the defined verification objectives. For those who want all the answers now, Accellera recorded this DVCon training session that goes over the basics of the language and how tools work. I use many of the same […]