It’s always good to hear what real users think of products. Here is a very detailed review (~4000 words) by an Anonymous user, nick named Ant-Man (from the movie). Overall it’s a very strong endorsement of Perspec, and summarizes the main reasons its adoption and user base are growing rapidly. Read the full write-up here . In the write-up, the user gives an overview of Portable Stimulus, and covers 6 categories of tool capabilities: PSS Modeling PSS Constraint Solving PSS Test Intent PSS Libraries & Apps PSS Debug PSS Coverage It’s a very interesting read, comparing and contrasting Perspec technology versus Breker. With Perspec coming out on top, there are many valuable points made. Here I will highlight just a few: While Portable Stimulus is about test portability across various verification engines, the real value is in the improvements to engineering productivity while creating a higher quality end product. According to this user, the most impactful are test intent capture, coverage, and project-to-project reuse. “The automation can save many man-months of effort, and reduce errors.” The Cadence Portable Stimulus language (System Level Notation - SLN) is easier to use than graph-based input. And it’s the basis for the Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) that is in the final stages of ratification: “From what we saw, Perspec's text-based modeling doesn't have the limitations of Breker's graph-based modeling.” “However , Perspec still automatically generates a graph view so you can see what you've done.” Creating tests is very easy in Perspec: “It's easier to capture and describe high-level hierarchical actions in Perspec (vs. Breker).” The Perspec library for Arm is very valuable: “I've been very happy with Perspec's libraries. They help a lot with our entire coherency, ARM power, and ARM process verification. With Perspec, you can verify the coherency within the ARM subsystem and the overall system coherency. On our present SoC, the coherency alone can be from 10% to 20% percent of all our testing effort. For ARM power aspects, Perspec does full power verification on the ARM subsystems in their pre-defined processor cores. Instead of taking weeks to manually regenerate tests for our derivative designs, we do it in Perspec in only a few hours.” PSS Debugging is crucial, and Perspec provides a rich solution: “I prefer Perspec's way of checking your tests progress from both a control-flow perspective and data-flow perspective.” “In addition, since Cadence Indago debug supports Perspec SLN , all of Indago's "big data" debug features are available.” PSS Coverage is really a new type, at the system level. It provides an opportunity to better understand your design and the status of your SoC verification efforts. The coverage section is almost 1/3 of the entire write-up, and is clearly an area of importance to this user. “Perspec's advanced runtime coverage is the main difference between us verifying an entire complex SoC vs. us verifying just cores .” “There are two main types of coverage: Pre-Runtime Coverage ("Gen-Time" coverage) Perspec's Gen-Time coverage is more elaborate…plus it is more integrated into the standard CDNS coverage flow. Runtime Coverage Perspec has both basic runtime coverage (as described above) and advanced runtime coverage.” The conclusion is that Perspec is easy to use and super valuable in this user’s projects. “For us, Cadence Perspec is the best portable stimulus tool for our complex SoCs. Compared to Breker, in Perspec it's easier / more flexible to model, easier to specify test intent, it has better (and *integrated*) debug and coverage -- plus more advanced coverage. Also the Perspec GUI works. We've been happy with Perspec. It's saved us man-months per project. Plus, with Perspec we've had a flood of extra test cases that we wouldn't have had otherwise, due to our limited staffing and time constraints.” You can learn more about Perspec System Verifier here .![]()
↧