Minutes, IBIS Quality Task Group

20 July 2021

12:00-13:00 EST (09:00-10:00 PST)

ROLL CALL

ANSYS                             * Curtis Clark
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:

- None


Review of previous meeting minutes:
Minutes from the July 6, 2021 meetings were reviewed.  Randy Wolff moved to accept
the minutes. Bob Ross seconded.  Without objection the minutes were approved.


ARs:
- None


NEW ITEMS:

New parser bug reports:
Bob Ross reported that Curtis Clark had sent a new bug report.  Bob asked if dll/so
files could be provided for the testcase.  Curtis Clark said the "icg" files from the
IBISCHK test suite could be used.  He said those could not be included in the zip file
for security reasons.  Bob said he would get them from the source package and add them
to the bug report.

Mike LaBonte showed the bug report.  Curtis described the bug, which would become BUG217.
The bug involved dll/so files specified by relative path, with IBISCHK considered an
error. That was correct for IBIS 6.0 files.  Changing AMI_Version from 6.0 to 7.0 made
the errors go away.  A complication was that commenting out either of the Executable
lines in the IBIS file would make IBISCHK not complain.  Bob said we should add this
to the current development effort.

There was some discussion on the use of backward slashes. Randy Wolff showed section
3 of IBIS 7.0, which clearly allowed only forward slashes.

Mike asked what the bug classification should be.  Curtis said BIRD186 had been
introduced in 7.0 to allow subdirectories, reversing the IBIS 6.0 policy.  BIRD182 made
paths a bug, so the parser behavior would depend on IBIS_Ver.  Mike said we did not
have a "frequency of occurrence" classification for our bug reports, which was common
in software.  Bob suggested severe severity and high priority.  Mike and Curtis agreed.
Bob said he would update the bug report and share the final testcase for review.

AR: Bob Ross to update and post IBISCHK BUG217

Curtis said he had also found an "if else" issue in the hdr.c source code file. Mike
showed an email from Curtis.  Curtis described the error. The code would not work as
intended if gbAllowAnyVersion was true and IBIS_Ver was 6.1.  Bob said there should
be a bug report.  Curtis suggested asking the developer if the code is as intended.
It was not clear how gbAllowAnyVersion was used.

AR: Bob Ross to ask IBISCHK developer to review hdr.c "if else" code issue.


IBISCHK710 development:
Bob Ross said the developer had suggested adding "EMD" as a qualifier to some keywords.
Mike LaBonte showed an email.  Bob said [Designator Pin List] would be ambiguous if
"NC" was an available choice, because several pins could connect to "NC", but each
pin had to have a unique signal.

Mike noted that a second question about bus_label had been asked, about the difference
between the character lengths of signal_name and bus_label.  Signal_name allowed 40
characters and bus_label allowed 15 characters.  Mike suggested that the code might
have a need to store signal names in the place of bus_labels, which might require that
bus_label fields allowed 40 characters internally.  Bob gave an example of the problem.

Bob said the bus_label internally should have no size limits. Mike said the parser
made extensive use of statically allocated memory, and it would have to be converted
to use dynamic memory to support that.  Curtis said the parser release notes mentioned
that parser size had increased due to increasing the size of static memory fields,
in the previous release.


TSCHK201 development:
Mike LaBonte noted that he had told invited beta testers of a July 20 planned release
date.  However, given the message text change suggested by Michael Mirmak, it could
be delayed.  We decided that the E2103 message should be:

"error E2103: invalid option (#) line in input Touchstone file"

AR: Mike LaBonte to update E2103 message in tschk201

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


Bob Ross moved to adjourn. Randy Wolff seconded. Without objection the meeting ended.

Meeting ended: 13:07 ET

Next meeting July 27, 2021