SULTAN

Hello IBISIANS

As I mentioned in the last telephone conference we would like to make an
alternative suggestion for egg 8.

I propose to investigate the description format SULTAN which was developed
in a European reseach project called JESSI AC5. This project is on EMC
related issues for systems and PCBs and several mayor European companies like
Philips, Siemens, BULL Computers, Matra Aerospace etc. participated in this
project.

The SULTAN format aims at a neutral description of PCB data that gives
sufficient information for emc analysis. I agree with Kellee that there is
no real standard available in this area which is easy to use and contains
enough information for the analysis. As SULTAN is already used in the project
mentioned above it has shown its applicability for this purpose.

I see the following advantages of using SULTAN:

- Context free grammar
   * simple parser generation

- Well structured scopes for
   * PCBs
   * Components
   * Parts
   * etc.

- Based on primitive graphical elements (PGE)
   * easy to expand for new elements

- Multiple PCBs possible

- SULTAN has already shown its applicability in various projects

To give you a complete overview on SULTAN I put the SULTAN description
in postscript format on our ftp server (ftp.pad.incases.com) and I would ask
everybody to download the document. You will find the document
in the directory 'transfer/SULTAN'. The postscript file is gziped and is
named 'sultan.ps.gz'. I did not attach it in this mail as it is too large!

Looking forward for your feedback on the reflector,

Olaf

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INCASES Engineering GmbH * Vattmannstr. 3 * D-33100 Paderborn * Germany 
Olaf Rethmeier * Tel/Fax +49-5251-150-625/-700 * Email olaf@pad.incases.com 
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