Elk Grove, Calif., August 29, 2024 — Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the leading organization dedicated to the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, is delighted to announce the approval of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) 3.0 by its Board of Directors. The latest version of the standard is available for immediate download.
“The latest enhancements to the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard are set to significantly boost design productivity for system-level design and verification engineers worldwide,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera Chair. “I want to extend my congratulations to the PSS Working Group for their exceptional dedication and effort in delivering this updated version to engineers around the globe.”
PSS defines a means 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 simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, and post-silicon testing. By defining scenarios in a single representation, users can specify intent once and observe consistent behavior across multiple implementations.
This standard offers a declarative environment designed for abstract behavioral descriptions using actions, inputs, outputs, and resource dependencies, and integration into use cases including data and control flows. These use cases capture verification intent that can be analyzed to produce a broad spectrum of valid scenarios for multiple execution platforms. Additionally, the standard includes a preliminary mechanism to capture the programmer’s view of a peripheral device, independent of the underlying platform, which further enhances its portability and versatility.
“We have added significant features to PSS 3.0, further advancing its impact on modern electronic system verification,” stated Matthew Ballance, Chair of the Portable Stimulus Working Group. “Thanks to the collaborative efforts and hands-on contributions from both tool suppliers and customers within our working group, the standard continues to evolve to address today’s complex verification challenges.”
Additions to PSS 3.0:
PSS 3.0 adds many new features, corrects errors, clarifies aspects of the language and semantic definitions, and much more. The most substantial feature added to PSS 3.0 is support for behavioral coverage where several scenarios can be generated from a single PSS specification. These scenarios vary in action order and data. Coverage statements identify a key action order and data combination that must be observed to exercise key functionality. The specification of the observed action order – and possibly the data related to this ordering – is called behavioral coverage.
Other substantial new features include:
- Support for “sub-string operator” and string methods
- Support to allow collection of reference types
- Support to allow platform qualifiers on function prototype declarations
- Clarified static const semantics
- Support for comments in template blocks
- Support for yielding control with cooperative multitasking
- Address space group
- PSS-SystemVerilog mapping for PSS lists
- “Formal semantics of behavioral coverage” annex
More Information and Background on Portable Stimulus:
Members of the working group presented a tutorial, “Efficient Portable Programming-Sequence Development with PSS,” during DVCon U.S. 2024. The tutorial is divided into sections that include what portable stimulus is, the motivation behind the standard, developing reusable test content at the block level, sub-system and SoC-level testing with PSS, and post-silicon testing with PSS.
Accellera has additional resources available to help you learn about portable stimulus and how it can positively impact your design and verification methodology. Additional information is available on the Portable Stimulus Working Group page. Feedback on the standard can also be provided through the Portable Stimulus Community Forum.
Join Accellera to help influence the ongoing development of PSS and other ongoing standards development that may be of interest. 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.
