IBIS Macromodel Task Group

Meeting date: 17 oct 2006

Members (asterisk for those attending):
* Arpad Muranyi, Intel Corp.
  Barry Katz, SiSoft
  Bob Ross, Teraspeed Consulting Group
* Doug White, Cisco Systems
* Hemant Shah, Cadence Design Systems
  Ian Dodd, Mentor Graphics
* Joe Abler, IBM
* John Angulo
  John Shields, Mentor Graphics
  Ken Willis, Cadence Design Systems
* Kumar, Cadence Design Systems
  Lance Wang, Cadence Design Systems
  Michael Mirmak, Intel Corp.
* Mike LaBonte, Cisco Systems
  Paul Fernando, NCSU
* Randy Wolff, Micron Technology
* Richard Ward, Texas Instruments
  Sanjeev Gupta, Agilent
  Shangli Wu, Cadence
  Todd Westerhoff, Cisco Systems
* Walter Katz, SiSoft
  Vuk Borich, Agilent
* Vikas Gupta, Xilinx

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Review of ARs:

- Michael will try to get access to the IEEE document they are voting on.
  He will check into access restrictions first.  If we get access to
  it, we will need a couple of volunteers to read the document and see if
  it is worth our while.
  - TBD

- Macro Library Documentation
  - Mike will get to this in Nov

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New Discussion:

Time zones: we will keep meeting at the same time (12:00p PT) after the
US time zone change.

VHPI 

We need to discuss this more before we define a new API.

Arpad showed a presentation: "Channel Analysis ??? with IBIS"
There are 2 ways to get a pulse response, characterize the channel and convolve, or run a plain analog simulation with drivers and receivers.
Arpad explained his view of Kumar's optimization process.
All simulated impulses are really ramps, although very short.
Convolution can be done in AMI_Init.
Some simulators will process the actual waveform in AMI_GetWave to initialize filter coefficients.
Walter: there are actually 4 steps. Both TX and RX have init functions.
1 call TX init with channel and TX params
2 call TX AMI_GetWave with stimulus pattern, generates V(RX)
3 call RX AMI_Init to setup RX for tap coeffs
4 call RX AMI_GetWave
Optimizer algorithm needs access to model parameters.
Special optimization features for ICM models would be good.
Should be able to use *-AMS API for waveform exchanges.
Walter: won't work for time domain simulators because it requires waveforms in time chunks, not one timestep at a time.
There is no live communication between the SPICE engine and optimization engine.
Walter: receiver might have a Framostat (black box)
Kumar: you could write a wrapper to make the black box mdel work in AMS.

AR: Mike investigate call dropouts. Arpad has been bounced out with busy
signal twice, Michael Mirmak once.

Kumar added 3 or 4 slides to his presentation. Nice diagrams showing
step-by-step operations.
Walter: how will we document in that model how it works?
Kumar: parameters are passed by character string. Waveforms a vector of doubles.

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Next meeting: Tuesday 24 Oct 2006 12:00pm PT