====================================================================== 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, March 3, 2010 9 AM US Pacific Time Telephone Bridge Passcode 916-356-2663 5 784-1578 (for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak) Live Meeting: http://tinyurl.com/yzo768q or: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/sisoft/join?id=M462B6&role=attend&pw=P9%3D8%3BP%277b Agenda: - Attendence - Call for patents - Opens - Model Connection Protocol (tentative) - Binary syntax proposal (tentative) - Sparse Matrix Mapping TSIRD status ====================================================================== Minutes from February 24, 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, Brad Brim SiSoft - Walter Katz Teraspeed Consulting Group - Bob Ross* ======================================================================== No patents were announced. Opens - None SPARSE MATRIX DRAFT 12 REVIEW We reviewed Draft 12 and agreed with the changes that Brad Brim had done. Draft 12 included a middle option concerning the sparse-label mapping rule that were sent out earlier. The only addition was to add a sentence requiring '(' not to be the first character. -------- A sparse-label is a string of one or more ASCII characters, as defined in the General Syntax Rules and Guidelines section.The last character of this string shall be the colon character ‘:’. The colon character may not appear in the string other than as the last character. Whitespace (space 20h or tab 09h) or a line termination (LF 0Ah or CR 0Dh) shall not occur in the string. A sparse-label shall not begin with an open parenthesis ‘(’, though this character may be present for any character other than the first or last in the string. A sparse-label may consist of only the colon character - a one character string “:”. -------- After some discussion we also will add a line to exclude the comment character '!' as part of a sparse-label. Bob Ross noted that in most cases a parser will report a failure anyway because of incorrect ':' colon count due to the ':' being hidden as part of a comment. However, we chose to state an explicit restriction. All the participants accepted all the above changes. Bob will edit in the change and use this as a basis for a TSIRD proposal to be introduced at the March 12 IBIS Open Forum meeting for review and outside comments. We discussed some of the IBIS processes, but we do expect to vote on this TSIRD after an appropriate review period. Walter Katz plans to implement the new syntax and will report back if he discovers any problems. Revisions necessary in other parts of a future Touchstone 2.1 draft will be handled separately. For example the File Format Description section on page 5 needs the two new keywords added. Also the Example numbers need to be inserted based on where the new keywords are documented. BINARY ENCODING Bob stated that the Interconnect Task Group will need a draft proposal on this topic. We plan to start with the IBM syntax as presented by Greg Edlund but we may decide to deviate if we discover issues. For example, we considered whether we need to deal with different operating system precision ranging from 32 to 128 bits (and beyond) more explicitly. Bob will contact people to see if someone wants to author an initial draft. Like the Sparse Matrix Mapping proposal, it would be formatted as a seperate section for Touchstone 2.1. FUTURE PLANS Bob discussed the future plans. The Model Connection Protocol may be ready for presentation at the next meeting, and it will be the major topic. If a draft Binary Encoding section is available, we could start on it as well. We might consider doing a complete editorial revision of Touchstone 2.0 to re-structure its content into more sections. That is the way the current proposals are being structured. We might also do some editorial revisions to comply more closely with official standardization formatting rules. NEXT MEETING Model Connection Protocol introduction and the binary encoding syntax are the primary topics planned for the next meeting.