Minutes, IBIS Quality Task Group

19 January 2021

11:00-12:00 EST (08:00-09:00 PST)

ROLL CALL

Intel Technology                    Michael Mirmak
Micron Technology                 * Randy Wolff
Signal Integrity Software:        * Mike LaBonte
Teraspeed Labs:                   * Bob Ross
Zuken USA:                          Lance Wang

Everyone in attendance marked by *

NOTE: "AR" = Action Required.

-----------------------MINUTES ---------------------------
Mike LaBonte conducted the meeting.

Call for IBIS related patent disclosures:

- None


Call for opens:

- Randy tschk2 bug


Review of previous meeting minutes:
Minutes from the January 12, 2021 meetings were reviewed.  Randy Wolff said he had been
cited as having moved to adjourn, but he was not present.  Mike LaBonte said that was
a mistake, and he believed Michael Mirmak had moved to adjourn.  Randy Wolff moved
to accept the minutes with changes as noted. Bob Ross seconded.  Without objection,
minutes were approved.


ARs:
- Mike LaBonte to run Splint analysis on IBISCHK 7.0.0 code for comparison
  - Started but not complete
- Bob Ross to draft IBISCHK 7.1.0 parser development contract
  - Not yet started


New parser bug reports:
Randy Wolff showed a draft TSCHK bug report and described the issue found.  TSCHK2 failed
to recognize that a Touchstone 2 file had a single reference impedance, and refused to
convert it to Touchstone 1.  Randy said it was necessary to comment out the [Reference]
keyword to make the conversion succeed.  He noted that Bob Ross had wondered if there
should be approximate equality checking to detect that 50 == 49.999999, a hypothetical
case.  Bob asked if the [Network Data] format in the testcase file looked correct.
Randy walked through that to confirm the correctness.  Bob asked if the same issue
would appear for a differential Touchstone 2 model.  Randy felt that that would be a
separate issue.

Bob said he would simplify the testcase somewhat and post the new bug.  Randy felt
it might be categorized as an enhancement.  Bob was concerned about scheduling a fix,
because we would be spending time on the issue when we had quite a bit of other work
in play.  Mike LaBonte said he might be able to put some time into fixing the code,
but the first challenge would be successfully compiling it.  We reviewed the existing
bug reports.  Bob noted that TSCHK bug 2 was a crash bug.  Bug 3 was about file size due
to unnecessary spaces.  Randy noted that zip archiving abated that problem.  Bob said
[Reference] values should take priority over the value in the Touchstone 2 comment,
but he was not sure if that was checked for inconsistencies.

AR: Mike LaBonte to evaluate TSCHK2 compile environment

Mike asked how many source code purchasers TSCHK2 had.  Bob said we had 5 or 6.
Mike felt that some companies purchased source code for the purpose of insuring
compatibility with supported platforms, not for use as a Touchstone front end.

AR: Bob Ross to post new TSCHK bug 4


IBISCHK security fixes:
Mike showed output from the "Splint" static code analyzer, for IBISCHK 7.0.0 source code.
An IBISCHK7 makefile had been modified to run the Splint check.  In "strict" mode, Splint
produced many warnings that were not security related.  Mike had been adding runtime
flags to suppress the non-security warnings, but that work was not yet completed.
He said that there were also some warnings found by Michael Mirmak that Splint did
not seem to find, maybe about 30% of them.  Bob said it would be more difficult to
fix the issues that could not be rechecked.

AR: Mike LaBonte to complete static analysis of IBISCHK 7.0.0 source code


IBIS-ISS parser development:
No discussion.


IBISCHK 7.1.0:
No discussion.


Tabled topics (no discussion without motion):
  - BIRD181.2

Mike LaBonte moved to adjourn. Randy Wolff seconded. Without objection the meeting ended.

Meeting ended: 12:04 ET

Next meeting January 26, 2021