PSS 2.0 Is Available and Driving Portable Stimulus to the Mainstream!

Three years ago, PSS (Portable Test and Stimulus) specification 1.0 was released and started to reshape the way design and verification engineers think about SoC level verification and testing. It took a noble idea of creating a single representation of stimulus and test scenarios that can be usable by a variety of users, different phases of the design and different execution engines, and translated it into a new concise language.     

PSS1.0 introduced all the fundamental concepts of scenario modeling and the terms for test implementation, enabling dozens of companies to start shifting their tests and find the right balance for them between PSS, UVM, C and other methods. Numerous papers were published, demonstrating dramatic productivity gain achieved by content reuse and automated scenarios coverage maximization.  

But it wasn't all that rosy - the industry adoption also exposed that the language defined in version 1.0 was quite limited and quite a few workarounds and additions were required to make it applicable for real-life scenarios. 

It took almost 3 years to translate all the feedback and enhancements proposals into a new, powerful version of the standard - PSS 2.0, that was just ratified! This time, the objective is to go to the mainstream and make PSS a common practice with a strong eco-system, on-the-shelf content and supporting community. 

PSS2.0 includes massive enhancements across all aspects of the language:

• Scenario modeling level enhancements that are aimed to enable capturing reusable/generic scenario building blocks. Examples are the ‘replicate’ statement, the ‘forall’ constraint form, and template actions.
• Enhancements to enable portable implementation of scenarios. These include a full procedural language to define exec-blocks and functions and generalized type binding to C and SystemVerilog.
• Inclusion of APIs for representing memories, registers, and execution agents. These were completely missing in PSS1.0.

Perspec System Verifier is the leading PSS industry tool, successfully adopted by dozens of customers. Most of the enhancements mentioned above are based on contributions from Cadence and styled after features, constructs, and APIs existing for years in Perspec’s SLN (Cadence's complementary portable stimulus language).

It should come as no surprise to Perspec users that all the PSS2.0 features are already supported by Perspec, with mature engines and ready-to-use tests libraries to ease and speed up the adoption of PSS 2.0.

The new PSS 2.0 standard can be found here. If you are building your next project testbench and want to leverage the new standard capabilities, don't hesitate to contact us!

Moshik