[IBIS] *-AMS modeling and hurting companies?

Mike,

I would like to respond to two of your earlier points.

1)  "As someone with a software background I would love to play
with AMS languages, but having been successful with the macromodel
approach all along I see no need."

This depends greatly on what you want to model.  I doubt that you
will be able to make (efficient) behavioral models for the upcoming
fancy buffer technologies, such as ones having FIR filters, decision
feedback loops, clock recovery circuits, etc...  I am afraid that
if we don't prepare the capabilities for these now, we will again
lag behind with our modeling capabilities when the need is burning.
At that time people will ***again*** continue bashing IBIS saying:
see, IBIS can never keep up with design technology, and there is
nothing else that works but SPICE.

I agree, *-AMS may be a lot more than what we need today for most of
our modeling needs, but in order to get out of this lagging mode I
think we need to be proactive and start getting familiar with *-AMS
now, so that by the time we will really need it we should have
something in place that is well proven widely implemented by tool
vendors, and is familiar to the industry.  It will be too late to
start scratching our head then in attempt to find a viable solution.


2)  "Also, as far as I know AMS involves a lot of buck$ and would
leave all but 2 simulator companies with a big disadvantage."


Let's just look at some facts.  Here is the top portion of BIRD75.8,
the language extension BIRD to IBIS:

BIRD ID#:        75.8
ISSUE TITLE:     Multi-Lingual Model Support
REQUESTER:       Bob Ross and Chris Reid, Mentor Graphics, Arpad Muranyi
                 and Michael Mirmak, Intel
DATE SUBMITTED:  3/29/02, 5/3/02, 7/15/02, 8/14/02, 9/11/02, 9/27/02,
                 10/18/02, 12/20/02, 12/23/02
DATE ACCEPTED BY IBIS OPEN FORUM: 1/10/03


Notice the submission dates, they span about ten months or so.

Also, the IBIS 4.1 specification including this BIRD was ratified on
January 30, 2004, more than a year after the last version of BIRD75.8
was submitted.  This indicates that the idea of the *-AMS language
extensions was openly discussed for about two years before it was
voted to become part of the official IBIS specification.  It didn't
come as a surprise.  There was enough time to find out when the big
vote will occur for IBIS 4.1.

Quote from the minutes of the January 10, 2003 IBIS Open Forum
teleconference in which the last version of this BIRD was voted on:

"With no further discussion Stephen Peters called for a vote on both
BIRD77.2 and BIRD75.8 together.  Both BIRDs were approved unanimously."

Quote from the minutes of the January 30, 2004 IBIS Open Forum
teleconference:

"Bob Ross moved to vote on approval of the draft specification as IBIS 4.1.
The motion was seconded by John Angulo.  Michael called for a vote, and
the draft document was unanimously approved as IBIS 4.1."

Also, I counted 29 and 30 companies under the "VOTING MEMBERS AND 2003
PARTICIPANTS LIST" and "VOTING MEMBERS AND 2004 PARTICIPANTS" in the
above mentioned two meeting minutes.  This represents more than just
those two simulator companies you are referring to in your message.  I
wonder, how come none of them showed up, or spoke up in these meetings
that this would hurt them?  How come we are still getting these kinds
of comments now, exactly three years after the first version of this
BIRD, BIRD75.1 was officially submitted?

By the way, the very first presentation in IBIS meetings on VHDL-AMS
and Verilog-AMS was done at DAC2000 on June 8, 2000, almost five years
ago:  http://www.eda.org/pub/ibis/summits/jun00/bakalar.zip

Let me ask, what is going on here?  None of the so-called hurting
companies showed up to vote, and we should refrain from releasing
*-AMS models now because we need to feel sorry for them?   Hmmm, I
don't get this picture...

Arpad
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