PSS in the Open
5 parts, in reading order.
PSS 3.1 Is Out for Public Review -- Here's What Changed
After roughly two years of work, the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) released PSS 3.1 for public review. PSS 3.1 is a so-called 'minor' release, which is always a bit subjective. PSS 3.1 doesn't introduce major new features, the way that PSS …
PSS 3.1: Simplifying Constraint Modeling
PSS language constructs fall into two main categories: declarative and procedural. When you see 'declarative', think 'rules' and 'constraints'. A declarative description is captured in terms of boundaries and relationships that must hold for the description …
PSS 3.1: Simplifying Composition
A PSS description is structure, in much the same way that hardware is structural. Even PSS activities are visualized as UML diagrams -- which have a certain structure to them. The next category of features to look at in PSS 3.1 are features that help to simpli…
PSS 3.1: Target Code
A PSS description has two fundamental ways of interfacing with a platform: by specifying the APIs to call, or the code to generate. We'll talk more about the API-based approach in the next post, but for now we focus on what's new with target-code generation in…
PSS 3.1: Target Runtime
The two ways a PSS description connects to a platform have very different tradeoffs. Target-code generation -- last post's subject -- gives you fine-grained control over the syntax of the code that implements a test; it treats PSS as a language for generatin…