BIRD58 discussion continued

IBIS Folks,

A thought occurred to me during today's BIRD58 discussion during the Open
Forum call. What happens when a user gets an IBIS datasheet for a
multi-stage driver but isn't aware that the simulator does not use the
related keywords? The user may get bogus simulation results and not know
it until he or she has failing hardware on the test floor. Now, you can
say that the user should be better educated, and that's true. Education is
an across-the-board problem for users and modeling engineers. However, we
might be allowing an opening for IBIS to get a black eye by allowing for
top-level data to exist under the model statement for a multi-stage driver
. If the data is there, it may be used.

I think I understand the simulator argument; simulator vendors that don't
support multi-staged drivers don't want to hurt their sales, right? But
unless you pop up a window that tells the user, "You're about to use an
IBIS datasheet for a multi-stage driver and we don't support this," the
user may unwittingly be taking on a very big risk. It just seems to me
that the most responsible thing to do is to make IBIS itself idiot-proof in
this respect by not allowing IV curves in the top-level model. VT tables
are great; they can be used for correlation.

I'm sure this issue was discussed prior to my involvement, so I apologize
if I'm trying to resurrect something that was already settled. I'm not
sure I totally understand the ramifications of what I'm saying here, but I
suspect it might mean holding up IBIS 3.2 and the parser if we actually did
what I'm suggesting? In that case, I'm sure this won't be a very popular
posting :-(

Greg Edlund
Advisory Engineer, Critical Net Analysis
IBM
3650 Hwy. 52 N, Dept. HDC
Rochester, MN 55901
gedlund@us.ibm.com
Received on Fri Mar 26 15:17:12 1999