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IBIS INTERCONNECT MODELING AD HOC TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES

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

Mailing list: ibis-interconn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Minutes from October 22:

Attendees:
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(* 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*
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 announced.

Michael called for comments on the current draft Touchstone 2.0 specification.

Bob suggested that the team should converge on a draft without large
numbers of new features.  In his discussions with Walter Katz, they
agreed to take port names and other proposals "off the table."

The new features that still need to be discussed included:
- changes to the keyword structure regarding spaces and underscores
- an information section
- [Data] or a similar keyword to identify and offset data blocks

Walter added that both the data and information sections should be
offset using a begin/end pair.

On keyword structures, the equivalence of spaces and underscores is an
IBIS convention but was noted by Rob as a potential problem for parsers.
Rob added that nesting of [Begin ...] and [End ...] structures should be
explicitly prohibited, for the same reasons.

Bob provided an outline of the interconnect information keywords.  At a high
level, the information group would identify and gather in one place
information that was not required for correct data formatting, but would
be useful for data interpretation.  In order to avoid biasing the specification
toward any particular application, different keywords could be defined within
the information section, to prevent problems with minimal parsers.

The filename extension .ts was proposed as an alternative to the .snp
structure.

Discussion will continue in the next meeting.  Walter will provide a
summary list of changes/proposals to the mailing list.

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Team Objectives:
1) complete ICM-IBIS linking BIRD and any associated changes to the
   ICM specification
2) update the ICM specification, if needed, to clarify the mapping of
   ICM nodes to S-parameter ports
3) complete a specification for "Touchstone Plus" or similar
   industry-standard definition for Touchstone-like files, to include
   complex impedance references, removal of limits on the maximum number
   of ports and per-port impedance references

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