Elk Grove, Calif., June 15, 2017 — Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced today that an Early Adopter release of the Portable Stimulus Specification has been made available by the Portable Stimulus Working Group for public review. The specification is immediately available for download.
The Portable Stimulus Specification defines a standard mechanism for the specification of verification intent and behaviors that would be reusable across target platforms (e.g., virtual platforms, simulation, emulation, prototypes, silicon, etc.) 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 (read the press release here). The working group is comprised of 17 user and EDA vendor companies (see list of participating companies below).
“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,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera chair. “It is our mission at Accellera to provide a platform for collaboration and innovation so that the electronics industry can deliver global standards that improve design and verification productivity for electronics products. The hard work and dedication of this group exemplifies just that.”
“The Early Adopter specification public review is an important milestone for our working group,” stated 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.”
About the Portable Stimulus Early Adopter Specification
The Early Adopter specification provides a comprehensive explanation of the new Portable Stimulus Domain Specific language and equivalent C++ Class Library. This declarative language is designed for abstract behavioral description using actions; their inputs, outputs and resource dependencies; and their composition into use cases including data and control flows. These use cases capture test intent that can be analyzed to produce a wide range of possible legal scenarios for multiple execution platforms (e.g., virtual platforms, simulation, emulation, prototypes, silicon, etc.). The Early Adopter specification also includes a preliminary mechanism to capture the programmer’s view of a peripheral device, independent of the underlying platform, further enhancing portability.
The working group will be accepting feedback and comments on the specification untilFriday, 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 new Community forum will also be a resource for the latest information available as well as a place to ask questions and interact on issues regarding the Early Adopter release. In addition, the working group has produced a 3-part webinar series based on the Portable Stimulus Tutorial that will be presented live at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas as well as upcoming DVCon conferences around the world. 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. Attendance is free to DAC attendees, but registration is required.
Portable Stimulus Working Group Member Companies
AMD; AMIQ EDA; Analog Devices; Breker Verification Systems; Cadence Design Systems; Cisco, Cypress; IBM; Intel; Mentor, A Siemens Business; National Instruments; NVIDIA; NXP Semiconductors; Qualcomm; Semifore; Synopsys; Vayavya Labs.
About Accellera Systems Initiative
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 or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence; Mentor, A Siemens Business; and Synopsys.
