Thought Leadership

Portable Stimulus and Lots More at the Verification Academy @DAC

By Tom Fitzpatrick

Spring appears to have finally arrived in New England (although sometimes it’s tough to tell through all the rain), and that means, of course, that DAC is just around the corner.

DAC is always one of my favorite weeks of the year, and I’m really looking forward to all the great presentations and other activity we’ll be hosting in the Verification Academy booth (booth #617). This year will be particularly hectic for me as I’ll be doing four different Portable Stimulus presentations throughout the week:

  • Monday @10am: Portable Stimulus: Is It Revolution or Evolution?
    This presentation will show how we at Mentor can help you minimize the disruption you might otherwise experience, by taking an incremental approach to evolving your existing verification flows to fully incorporate the revolutionary capabilities of Portable Stimulus.
  • Monday @5pm: Don’t Do It Yourself: Questa VIP & inFact Accelerate UVM Testbench Development
    Here I’ll show you how UVM and Questa Verification IP can be used to provide the perfect target platform that you can use to realize protocol-specific verification environments from your abstract Portable Stimulus model. I’ll also cover (pardon the pun) how inFact uses your model to automate the generation of coverage-driven scenarios to reach your goals as efficiently as possible.
  • Tuesday @2pm: Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Make the Most of your UVM Environment for Coverage Closure AND Bug Hunting with PSS Infused Apps for SystemVerilog
    In this presentation, I’ll introduce Questa inFact’s PSS Apps for SystemVerilog to let you focus your UVM or SystemVerilog verification on what you want to test, not how.  You’ll see how the inFact PSS Apps can help you create correct-by-construction SystemVerilog covergroups, analyze your constraints pre-simulation, and generate efficient stimulus for coverage closure and bug hunting.
  • Wednesday @5pm: UVM and Portable Stimulus: A Match Made in Heaven
    With the advent of the new Portable Test and Stimulus standard from Accellera, one of the most asked questions we hear is, “will Portable Stimulus replace UVM?” The answer is absolutely not. Portable Stimulus was conceived from the ground up to take advantage of UVM as one of the possible realization platforms for which tools may generate tests. This session will look at the PSS-UVM relationship and help attendees understand this important and powerful relationship. [NOTE: Bonus points to anyone who actually attends a presentation at 5pm on Wednesday]

Of course, there’s a lot more going on in the booth, so be sure to check out the full schedule and register for sessions here. I hope to see you all at DAC!

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2019/05/09/portable-stimulus-and-lots-more-at-the-verification-academy-dac/