IBIS Macromodel Task Group Meeting date: 03 January 2017 Members (asterisk for those attending): ANSYS: * Dan Dvorscak * Curtis Clark Broadcom (Avago): Xingdong Dai Bob Miller Cadence Design Systems: * Ambrish Varma Brad Brim Kumar Keshavan Ken Willis Cisco: Seungyong (Brian) Baek eASIC: * David Banas Marc Kowalski Ericsson: Anders Ekholm GlobalFoundries: Steve Parker IBM Luis Armenta Trevor Timpane Intel: Michael Mirmak Keysight Technologies: Fangyi Rao Radek Biernacki * Ming Yan Maxim Integrated Products: Hassan Rafat Mentor Graphics: John Angulo * Arpad Muranyi Micron Technology: * Randy Wolff Justin Butterfield QLogic Corp.: James Zhou Andy Joy SiSoft: * Walter Katz Todd Westerhoff * Mike LaBonte Synopsys: Rita Horner * Kevin Li Teraspeed Consulting Group: Scott McMorrow Teraspeed Labs: * Bob Ross TI: Alfred Chong The meeting was led by Arpad Muranyi. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opens: - None. ------------- Review of ARs: - Walter and Radek to review BIRD 158.3. - Done. Discussion is ongoing in ATM. - Arpad had asked the group to review BIRD 187.1 prior to this meeting. - Done. -------------------------- Call for patent disclosure: - None. ------------------------- Review of Meeting Minutes: - Arpad: Does anyone have any comments or corrections? [none] - Mike L.: Motion to approve the minutes. - Dan: Second. - Arpad: Anyone opposed? [none] ------------- New Discussion: Bob Ross and Radek's discussion of Editorial Task Group Issues: - Discussion: Bob noted that he and Radek had not been able to meet since the last ATM meeting. BIRD 187.1 review: - Discussion: Bob noted that it would be better to discuss when Michael Mirmak was in attendance. Bob said that he thought some of the language explicitly referenced In and InOut parameters, when in fact it applied to other Usages as well. Mike L. noted that he thought it looked pretty good with the changes Michael M. had made in response to ATM discussions. Mike L. noted one editorial issue, certain text was shown in the color red even after change tracking had been turned off. Mike L. agreed it would be best to wait until Michael M. was in attendance. Arpad suggested someone send out an email with any questions prior to the next meeting. IBIS 6.2 discussion (what is needed to complete it?): - Arpad: How close are we to getting 6.2 out? - The discussions from Bob and Radek address some of the ground cleanup topics. That is what 6.2 was supposed to deal with, right? - Bob: We've been at a stalemate over a clarification. - Walter recently suggested that we could make a blanket statement, "... if you don't do this, then your results for power-aware analysis may be suspect..." - That suggestion might resolve the stalemate. - Arpad: What else is there? - Bob: We currently have 8 BIRDs scheduled plus some as yet unwritten BIRDs. - We currently plan to populate the BIRD webpage with an additional column documenting the targeted release for each BIRD. - Discussion: Mike L. shared the "IBIS 6.2 BIRD Candidates (rev 6)" spreadsheet that was originally used in the Editorial Task Group meetings. He noted that it only included BIRDs up to 185. BIRDs 186, 187, and 188 had since been submitted. Arpad noted that he thought 6.2 was only going to include the ground cleanup modifications. Bob said this was one suggestion, but we had not officially decided on that. Bob noted that he thought it made sense to assume a BIRD goes into the next release unless it is specifically targeted for a major release. Mike L. said he was concerned that any items on the spreadsheet that had not been submitted as BIRDs might be important topics that we haven't been addressing yet (items a, d, f, g, i). Arpad said it was important to update this spreadsheet and asked Mike L. if he would take the AR to update it. Mike L. said he would, and that it made sense to have ATM adopt control over it. Walter noted that he thought BIRD 186 should be targeted for whatever release would contain BIRD 147. Bob agreed. BIRD 158 syntax vs. "official" BIRD 160 syntax. - Arpad: We discussed this at the last meeting. - I presented some slides on how to write BIRD 158 models in official IBIS syntax (BIRD 160 syntax). - We did not have time to complete the discussions. - Discussion: Walter shared a new example he had prepared. His example included an .ibs file, .ami files, and subcircuit files. The example demonstrated a BIRD 160 compliant syntax that extracted the parameter values from the .ami files that contained BIRD 158 reserved parameters. Walter noted that he considered this example a compromise between the two approaches. Walter noted that the example was set up for a standard "corner" case (3 corners), but that one of BIRD 158's advantages was that it is easier to implement more than three cases than it is with BIRD 160. Arpad asked how the BIRD 160 syntax shown in Walter's example would be treated if BIRD 158 were approved. Would we require the model maker to explicitly add the BIRD 160 type syntax if they wanted a model that could be used for non-AMI analysis, or would we make the BIRD 160 syntax implicit when an .ami file included the BIRD 158 parameters? Arpad said we had to deal with this potential redundancy, and noted that he wasn't sure we should treat the BIRD 160 syntax as implicit because a model maker using BIRD 158 syntax might want that model to be limited to AMI analysis. Ambrish noted that he was still opposed to the "fixed topology" approach of the BIRD 158 shortcut. He also noted that BIRD 160 was more general, and he agreed with Arpad's statement that an EDA tool could parse out the BIRD 160 syntax and detect that a BIRD 158 style Touchstone approach was being used. Walter noted that the BIRD 158 type topology had been a requirement for almost 10 years and had not been outgrown. He reiterated his concern that forcing an EDA tool, particularly one that wanted to work in the frequency domain exclusively, to parse through [External Model]s and subcircuits to determine that they were merely wrappers for a BIRD 158 type approach was not a reasonable solution. Walter said he would post his example along with BIRD 158.4 so that we can continue the discussion. - Arpad: Thank you all for joining. AR: Walter to email his example and BIRD 158.4 to the ATM list. AR: Mike LaBonte to update the "IBIS 6.2 BIRD Candidates" to rev 7 and send it to the ATM list. ------------- Next meeting: 10 January 2017 12:00pm PT ------------- IBIS Interconnect SPICE Wish List: 1) Simulator directives