====================================================================== IBIS INTERCONNECT MODELING AD HOC TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES AND AGENDA http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/ Mailing list: ibis-interconn@freelists.org ====================================================================== Next Meeting Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9 AM US Pacific Time Telephone Bridge Passcode 916-356-2663 5 909-3156 (for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak) Live Meeting: http://tinyurl.com/yzo768q (CHANGED FROM THE JANUARY 6 MEETING) or: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/sisoft/join?id=M462B6&role=attend&pw=P9%3D8%3BP%277b Agenda: - Attendence - Call for patents - Opens - Binary Format Responses and Questions - Sparse Matrices Format - Label Syntax - MCP plans ====================================================================== Minutes from January 6, 2010: Attendees: ---------- (* denotes present) Agilent - Radek Biernacki*, John Moore, Ken Wong Ansoft - Denis Soldo Cadence Design Systems - Terry Jernberg, Brad Griffin Green Streak Programs - Lynne Green Hewlett-Packard - Rob Elliott IBM - Greg Edlund* Intel - Michael Mirmak* Mentor Graphics Corp. - John Angulo, Vladimir Dmitriev-Zdorov Micron Technology - Randy Wolff Sigrity - Sam Chitwood, Raymond Y. Chen, Tao Su, Brad Brim* SiSoft - Walter Katz* Teraspeed Consulting Group - Bob Ross* ======================================================================== Michael Mirmak conducted this meeting and Bob Ross is providing the minutes. No patents were announced. Opens - Meeting plans, logistical transistions (while Michael Mirmak is in Taiwan) and priorities for the next 3 months Walter Katz introduced the IBM binary format proposal sent out earlier by Greg Edlund: -------- Documented in the internal version of HSSCDR is the support to read in binary format s-parameter files. Binary format touchstone files as defined by HSSCDR add the statement : % BINARY DL % BINARY DB % BINARY FL % BINARY FB % BINARY ML % BINARY MB The format specifier convention is as follows : D : double F : float M : double freq, float data L : little-endian B : big-endian Thus DL is double, little-endian. to indicate binary format, the immediately following data is in binary instead of ASCII. The above line can be followed by a \n or a \r\n to indicate newline. Immediately following the newline sequence is one pad 0 byte which indicates the following data is binary format numbers. Binary format files can be generated using the -L[SAVE] command, see help -L or help chanl for more information. The advantage of binary format is a savings of about 5x to 6x in file size and much faster file I/O. ---------- Greg responded to several questions and comments during the meeting. Most of these dealt with learning about the proposal and whether it applies to the whole document or to the model data portion. Also this proposal is not combined with some other possible reduced order modeling proposals such as a residue-pole format. Walter and Bob Ross will generate some questions for Greg on a number of items including whether the binary formatting is for just the data portion or the whole file, and whether the binary encoding scheme can be made public. We plan to discuss this at a future meeting. Regarding priorities, Walter indicated that he favors pursuing the model connection protocol (MCP) format versus working on a nodal naming format within Touchstone. The MCP would also apply to SPICE formats and other formats, so it has wider potential for an integrated model connection flow. Bob commented that proposals on the MCP has been presented by Brad Brim or other authors at the last three IBIS Summit Meetings. There was general concensus that this was worth pursuing in the Interconnect Task Group. Bob indicated that we need to finalize the Sparse Matrix syntax by closing out the final issue regarding label naming rules. This involves whether labels should be integers or strings. This work can be set aside (possible with a TSIRD document and link) until we close out any further additions that might be included in a Touchstone 2.1 release. Then we can integrate everything into a Touchstone 2.1 release. This integration might involve some formatting changes in Touchstone 2.0 to make this addition and future ones easier to manage with less impact on the overall document. So, future works includes closing out the Sparse Matrix Format Syntax to a stable level, continue investigating the binary format, and also prepare working on a MCP when the proposal being developed off-line is ready for the Task Group consideration. The meetings for the next few months will be chaired by Bob, and Walter will help out with the live meeting and document management logistics. The focus of any specific meeting might be on a single topic, and these could alternate from meeting to meeting.