IBIS Macromodel Task Group Meeting date: 19 Jul 2011 Members (asterisk for those attending): Agilent: * Fangyi Rao * Radek Biernacki Ansys: Samuel Mertens * Dan Dvorscak Curtis Clark Arrow Electronics: Ian Dodd Cadence Design Systems: Terry Jernberg * Ambrish Varma Celsionix: Kellee Crisafulli Cisco Systems: * Mike LaBonte Ashwin Vasudevan Syed Huq Ericsson: Anders Ekholm IBM: * Greg Edlund Intel: Michael Mirmak LSI Logic: Wenyi Jin Mentor Graphics: * John Angulo Zhen Mu * Arpad Muranyi Micron Technology: * Randy Wolff NetLogic Microsystems: Ryan Couts Nokia-Siemens Networks: * Eckhard Lenski Sigrity: Brad Brim Kumar Keshavan * Ken Willis SiSoft: Walter Katz Todd Westerhoff Doug Burns Snowbush IP: Marcus Van Ierssel ST Micro: Syed Sadeghi Teraspeed Consulting Group: Scott McMorrow * Bob Ross TI: Casey Morrison Alfred Chong Vitesse Semiconductor: Eric Sweetman Xilinx: Mustansir Fanaswalla The meeting was lead by Arpad Muranyi ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Opens: - None -------------------------- Call for patent disclosure: - None ------------- Review of ARs: - Marcus, Ken and Walter update Backchannel BIRD draft - Done ------------- New Discussion: Ken discussed changes to the Backchannel BIRD: - Changes were made to the .bti file format: - Model_Specific was changed to Protocol_Specific - This is posted on the website - Bob: It may be better to have a binary data format than using quoted strings - Ken: This should be discussed by email - Bob: It is not clear what goes in each file - More documentation is needed - Ambrish: Could the slides be posted too? - Fangyi: Did we resolve training control and communication? - There are 3 possibilities to end training - Ken: We will try to use one parameter - Fangyi: We also had a question about having adequate information for crosstalk - Arpad: We start with each channel figuring it's own settings first - Fangyi: Then in training mode there is no crosstalk - Arpad: Maybe there should be two trainings - Fangyi: It is more realistic to have crosstalk for training - Arpad: It seems the aggressors should not be in training mode - The victim will not know what the noise source is - It will try to train out the crosstalk - Fangyi: If the crosstalk is strong the RX could be totally confused - Mike: The victim RX will want to control whether there is crosstalk during training AR: Ken send Backchannel slides for posting Ken: We should discuss our strategy for the other topics: - It may be too much for us to discuss all topics each week - Arpad: The order of submission to Open Forum doesn't matter - Walter prefers to get easy BIRDs out of the way - We have concentrated on Backchannel for two weeks - We will not discuss BIRD 121 only because Walter is not here BIRD 135 - Arpad: This was scheduled for a vote last Friday but it didn't happen - There were comments about the appropriate set of types for values - It was pointed out that Tap and UI are not in the BNF - does not say that it is float - Bob: Tap and UI are actually numbers - Why define True and False as string? - We don't need other numeric types as long as we have numbers - Arpad: We don't have to get far into this - Mike: It should be stated that Tap and UI are numbers - Radek: We are not talking about binary representation - They are all strings - It is only necessary to say how True and False are represented - Bob: So the Boolean strings would be unquoted - Radek: yes - Bob: Boolean usually evaluates to 0 or 1 Arpad showed page 187 of the IBIS 5.0 spec: - Arpad: Bob's concern is covered in the BIRD - John: This BNF describes the AMI file - The DLL implementation is a separate matter - Arpad: Are we recommending this for a vote - Mike: My concern was about how far the BNF should go - It could fully define the character sets or have no types for "value" - But if model makers can successfully use it as proposed that is OK - Arpad: We have character rules and such in the text - Radek moved to recommend the BIRD for voting in Open Forum - Eckhard seconded - The motion passed by acclamation Arpad showed the AMI parameters in/out BIRD: - Arpad: We should avoid rehashing things that are already decided - Radek: It was a legitimate Open Forum question - The EDA tool should initialize values, the DLL does nothing - The existing specification does not require it that way - With versioning there should be no issue - Arpad: Curtis was helpful on this but he is not here now - Bob: Are quotes needed? - Radek: They should not be used here, this is binary - John: This guarantees that there would be no return string after AMI_Init - It also makes it so an empty string is equivalent to NULL - Arpad highlighted a paragraph saying NULL pointers are not allowed - John: This allows DLL writers to be lazy about checking for NULL pointers - The EDA tools have to be more careful, and that is OK - Arpad: We didn't want the DLL to do strange things with pointers - We should resolve this by next week Meeting ended. ------------- Next meeting: 26 July 2011 12:00pm PT Next agenda: 1) Task list item discussions ------------- IBIS Interconnect SPICE Wish List: 1) Simulator directives