====================================================================== 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 20, 2010 9 AM US Pacific Time Telephone Bridge Passcode 916-356-2663 5 895-1681 (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 - Continued binary format discussion - Sparse Matrix Mapping proposal - Draft 8 review - Sparse label format Issue ====================================================================== Minutes from January 13, 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* ======================================================================== No patents were announced. Opens - None BINARY FORMAT: Walter Katz reported on binary format questions to Greg Edlund and responses. The commands are inserted just before the beginning of the network data portion. The command syntax starts with a % and is terminated by a 0 character in the next line according to this part of the explanation from Greg Edlund: --------- % 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. ---------- Walter indicated that this applies for 4 byte or 8 byte data. He also indicates that there exists an IEEE binary format standard. Walter has observed about a 5 times reduction in file size. One assumption Walter is making is that the .snp format is needed to determing the number of ports in the file. Regarding technical discussion, John Angulo asked if an [End] statement would need to be omitted if this were used for the network data portion of Touchstone 2.0. The response was that [End] would probably not be included. So if binary format is used for Touchstone 2.0, there might be some special rules. Greg is still trying to get an example to send to the committee. Regarding how to proceed, all the participants expressed interest in considering this. We would probably consider this only for the data portion of Touchstone since that is where the greatest need exists for file size and data storage reduction. Walter suggest a BIRD (Touchstone equivalent is TSIRD), and Bob suggested that if be configured assuming a separate section in Touchstone. Brad Brim suggested that this be considered only for Touchstone 2.X We mentioned IBIS providing a conversion utility, but questioned whether this is needed for sending and receiving files to others. Regular compression techniques such as using .zip files already are widely used. Greg indicated that IBM would be interested in having the format standardized. Walter indicated that processing binary data within an EDA tool might have its own challenges. This discussion will continue at the next meeting. SPARSE MATRIX MAPPING and LABEL FORMAT: Bob brought up the marked up Draft 8 copy of the proposal to introduce the topic concerning the label format issue. http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/index-bydate.htm http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/Sparse_Matrix_Mapping_draft8_markup.pdf However, because we have not reviewed the copy, we will do so as an agenda item at the next meeting. Walter discussed that the purpose and benefit of the format is to provide significant data pair reduction in Touchstone files. The term "data pair" is used in this proposal (and also exists in Touchstone in several locations) to describe the complex network data entries in RI, MA or DB formats. Since we were running out of time, Bob brought up part of Brad Brim's earlier presentation "Sparsity in Touchstone 2.n" with the sub-title: "labels" or "index-pair". http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/Sparse_Touchstone_File_Issues_02Dec2009.pdf Slides 12 and 13 illustrate how the data pair reduction for a 16-port S-parameter file (requiring 256 data pairs per frequency) is documented with a file having 8 data pairs per frequency. More details are in the presentation. These slides also illustrate the label syntax issue. We will continue the Binary format and Sparse Matrix Mapping discussion at the next meeting. We are holding off discussing the model connection protocol (MCP) topic until a proposal is ready.