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IBIS INTERCONNECT MODELING AD HOC TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES AND AGENDA

http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/

Mailing list: ibis-interconn@freelists.org

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Next Meeting
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
8 AM US Pacific Time

               Telephone     Bridge   Passcode
              916-356-2663     2      107-0639

(for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak)

LiveMeeting: https://webjoin.intel.com/?passcode=1070639

Agenda:
- Call for patents
- Opens
- Parser status update: C++ support and GNU prohibition?
- Sparse matrices and port/node mapping (Walter Katz)

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Minutes from May 20:

Attendees:
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(* denotes present)
Agilent                    - Radek Biernacki*, John Moore, Ken Wong
Ansoft                     - Denis Soldo
Cadence Design Systems     - Terry Jernberg, Brad Griffin
Cisco Systems              - Mike LaBonte
Green Streak Programs      - Lynne Green
Hewlett-Packard            - Rob Elliott
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*

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No patents were declared. 

Michael proposed a schedule and approach for parser bidding.  No objections
were raised.  An announcement will go out, with bid closure by June 30.  
The final specification is available.

Walter continued his description of proposals for port/node mapping and
sparse matrices.  In e-mail exchanges, Vladimir agreed that that causality 
would be retained in a transfer function representation.  As Touchstone 2 is 
a set of transfer functions, causality is a property of each of those
functions, independently.

The team agreed that Vladimir's definition of passivity is the correct one. 
For each frequency, energy in must be equal or greater than energy out.  
Michael asked about theory of causality preservation for frequency-domain 
data.  Radek responded that a good theory of this has been around for 40 years. 
 

Walter suggested public domain MATLAB scripts or other algorithms could
be added to the parser or referenced to check passivity.

Walter presented a sparse matrix format proposal, tying independent 
Touchstone files together with a single wrapping file.  Bob noted that 
SPICE has a K term for inductive coupling which doesn't repeat,
as Walter shows.  Bob observed that Walter is using indirection through names.

Radek noted that he did not necessarily see the point of multiple files,
nor did Vladimir.

Vladimir suggested there is no unique way to convert S-parameters to transfer 
functions, or impulse responses to transfer functions.  Bob expressed concern 
that 
multiple formats within a file would be suspicious.  Discussion will continue
in the next meeting.