A powerful new international EDA group has just come together—the PSL/Sugar Consortium. It is an international organization chartered to help hardware designers adopt and implement the Property Specification Language (PSL, formerly known as IBM Sugar). The group will endeavor to promote methodologies based on the language to speed design verification. The organization’s founding 15 members include:
- 0-In Design Automation Inc.
- @HDL Inc.
- Cadence Design Systems Inc.
- IBM Corp.
- Novas Software Inc.
- Real Intent Inc.
- Ricoh Co. Ltd.
- Summit Design Inc.
- SynaptiCAD Inc.
- Tharas Systems Inc.
- TNI-Valiosys
- TransEDA PLC
- Verisity Ltd.
- Veritable Inc.
- Verplex Systems Inc.
The PSL Language Reference Manual Version 1.01 was approved by Accellera’s Functional Verification Technical Committee early this year and is being considered for final approval by Accellera’s Board of Directors. The PSL/Sugar Consortium will complement Accellera by helping hardware designers adopt PSL-based methodologies, while Accellera’s Standards Group carries on its work of further defining the language.
Building awareness and driving usage of the language, the consortium will spearhead activities including the formation of a user’s group, sponsorship of PSL technical events, an on-line bulletin board for exchanging ideas, technical white papers and a website. The website will become a clearinghouse for information, connecting users with vendors for tools, services, intellectual property, and training.
A two-hour educational and organizational meeting will take place on Tuesday, June 3 from 9 to 11 am at the 40th Design Automation Conference. The meeting will be held in room 202A/B of the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif.
Based on IBM’s Sugar assertion language, the PSL gives engineers a standard means of specifying design properties using a concise syntax with clearly defined formal semantics. Among its benefits is the ability to easily and effectively use formal methods to verify complex IC designs.
Founding member Novas Software has announced that its Debussy and Verdi debugging tools will support the PSL 1.0 specification by the end of 2003. Further, they’ll provide interoperability with third-party tools that adopt PSL, including the Incisive verification platform from Cadence. Debussy and Verdi will work closely with simulators and formal tools that use PSL to verify design descriptions. They’ll be able to import the results produced by those tools and use their integrated tracing and visualization capabilities to view property results and PSL source code and track down the causes of design flaws.
Additional information on the PSL/Sugar Consortium can be found at the interim website located at http://www.verificationlib.org.
For more on PSL, visit http://www.accellera.org.