In the early days of the PSS rollout, some verification engineers were suspicious. Just as they were beginning to get comfortable with UVM, here came yet another standard to add to their learning and complexity overhead. Then the fog started to clear; UVM is ideal for block-level testing whereas PSS is ideal for system level testing.… Read More
Accellera invited me to attend their #61DAC panel discussion about the new Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) v3.0, and the formal press release was also just announced. The big idea with PSS is to enable seamless reuse of stimulus across simulation, emulation and post-silicon debug and prototyping.
Tom Fitzpatrick from Siemens… Read More
I stopped by the AMIQ EDA booth at DAC to get an update from Tom Anderson about their Integrated Development Environment (IDE), aimed at helping design and verification engineers save time. In my early IC design days we used either vi or emacs and were happy with having a somewhat smart text editor. With an IDE you get a whole new way … Read More
In the formal world the core technology is extremely powerful, and specialist users need full access to tackle difficult problems. But for many applications, teams prefer canned solutions built on the core technology yet scalable to non-experts. A similar dynamic appears to be playing out between System VIPs and PSS. PSS, the… Read More
With ever challenging time to market requirements, co-developing IP and firmware is imperative for all system development projects. But that doesn’t make the task any easier. Depending on the complexity of the system being developed, the task gets tougher. For example, different pieces of IP may be the output of various teams… Read More
.The UVM standard was first released by Accellera 10 years ago this month and is now by far the leading methodology for functionally verifying logic designs, especially at the block level. As I write, DVCon fast approaches so I talked to Tom Fitzpatrick, Verification Technologist at Siemens EDA (Mentor Graphics) for a perspective.… Read More
Mentor just released a white paper on this topic which I confess has taxed my abilities to blog the topic. It’s not that the white paper is not worthy – I’m sure it is. I’m less sure that I’m worthy to blog on such a detailed technical paper. But I’m always up for a challenge, so let’s see what I can make of this, extracting a quick and not very… Read More
RISC-V is obviously making progress. Independent of licensee signups and new technical offerings, the simple fact that Arm is responding – in fundamental changes to their licensing model and in allowing custom user extensions to the instruction set – is proof enough that they see a real competitive threat from RISC-V.
Which all… Read More
Learning is a never-ending process for design and verification engineers, so outside of reading SemiWiki you likely want to attend at least a few events per year to keep updated, learn something new, attend a workshop, or even present something that has made your IC project work much better than before. Sure, DAC is always a great… Read More
Breker has been in the system test synthesis game for 12 years, starting long before there was a PSS standard. Which means they probably have this figured out better than most, quite simply because they’ve seen it all and done it all. Breker is heavily involved in and aligned with the standard of course but it shouldn’t be surprising… Read More
