Matthew Ballance to Receive Accellera Systems Initiative Technical Excellence Award

Siemens’ Ballance will be honored during virtual DVCon U.S. 2021 for his contributions to the development of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard

Elk Grove, Calif., February 23, 2021 -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) announced today that Matthew Ballance, a member of the Portable Stimulus Working Group and a Product Engineer and Portable Stimulus Technologist with Siemens Digital Industries Software, is the recipient of the 2021 Accellera Technical Excellence Award. The award was established to recognize the outstanding achievements of an individual among Accellera’s working group members and their significant contributions to the development of its standards.

Ballance, one of the earliest and most frequent contributors to the Portable Test and Stimulus standard (PSS), will be presented with the award at virtual DVCon U.S. on Tuesday, March 2 at 2:00pm following the keynote presentation.

“Matthew has been one of the key contributors to the PSS standard,” stated Martin Barnasconi, Accellera Technical Committee Chair. “He has worked tirelessly driving the developments of PSS 2.0 by leading the sub-working group defining semantics of core language features, as well as being heavily involved in three additional PSS sub-working groups. Matthew’s role has been unprecedented: balancing and harmonizing the varied input from multiple contributors to the standard, while also championing its benefits among the user community. It is my pleasure to honor Matthew with the Accellera 2021 Technical Excellence Award for his commitment, expertise, and significant technical contributions to the advancement of the PSS standard.”

“It has been a privilege to be a part of an entirely new standard since its inception and I am honored to receive this award from Accellera,” stated Ballance, Product Engineer and Portable Stimulus Technologist with Siemens Digital Industries Software. “I have genuinely enjoyed working with such a tremendous and diverse group of contributors on the development of the Portable Stimulus standard and it is gratifying to see us coming very near to the release of PSS 2.0. I am proud of our team and our accomplishments and look forward to the continued advancement and adoption of Portable Stimulus.”

Ballance began his career at Mentor Graphics, now Siemens EDA, as a software developer working in the area of hardware/software co-verification. In subsequent years, he has worked in the areas of virtual prototyping and testbench automation in roles including Verification Technologist and Product Manager.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Oregon State University.

About the Accellera Technical Committee
Accellera's Technical Committee oversees 15 active working groups that produce effective and efficient Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and Intellectual Property (IP) standards for today’s advanced electronic integrated circuits and embedded systems. Working group participants contribute to the development of standards for the electronics and semiconductor industry. Technical contributors typically have many years of practical experience in standardization of methodologies and languages for system-level design, integration, verification, or automation. For a list of Accellera working groups, please click here.

About Accellera Systems Initiative
Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership. Follow @accellera on Twitter or to comment, please use #accellera. Accellera Global Sponsors are: Cadence, Siemens EDA, and Synopsys.

About DVCon U.S.
DVCon is the premier conference for discussion of the functional design and verification of electronic systems. DVCon is sponsored by Accellera Systems Initiative, an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating design and verification standards required by systems, semiconductor, intellectual property (IP) and electronic design automation (EDA) companies. In response to global interest, in addition to DVCon U.S., Accellera also sponsors events in China, Europe and India.  For more information about DVCon U.S., please visit www.dvcon.org. Follow DVCon on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DvCon or @dvcon_us on Twitter or to comment, please use #dvcon_us.


Accellera, Accellera Systems Initiative, and DVCon and are trademarks of Accellera Systems Initiative Inc. A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.