Hello Everyone, We had an interesting discussion in the IBIS Open Forum Teleconference this morning on the topic of when to release the next IBIS specification. As I was preparing the slides of my usual IBIS-ATM Task Group Report for the DesignCon IBIS Summit last week, http://www.eda.org/ibis/summits/jan15/muranyi.pdf it kind of "hit me" that we didn't have a new specification release for over a year. The current specification, v6.0 was released in September 2013, about a year and a half ago. Around that time we were also talking about a more regular release schedule that would be independent of how many BIRDs were available or how big they were. (This has some side effects regarding the costs associated with parser development, and the related questions on how much we should/can charge for it, but I do not want to talk about that in this email thread). Looking at the list of approved BIRDs on slide 3 in the presentation mentioned above I wonder if it would make sense to draw the line at where we are with the currently approved BIRDs and release a new IBIS specification right away. One of our goals in the ATM and Interconnect Task Groups was to include the badly needed new package modeling capabilities in the "next" IBIS version and (even though less emphasized) also the Back Channel BIRD. These are two major pieces of proposals we are still working on. And this is exactly why I am raising this question, because these are big topics and they are still being worked on. Many of the BIRDs which are currently approved are minor corrections or clarifications, but there are a few important technical ones among them too. Considering the amount of time we still need to complete the Package/Interconnect and Back Channel BIRDs I am leaning towards releasing a new specification now, in the spring of 2015, with the approved BIRDs and plan for a more major release perhaps for the fall of 2015 with the upcoming "big feature changes". Obviously we didn't make a decision on these question in the Open Forum meeting today, but we made a motion to put this topic on the agenda for the next meeting (three weeks from today, on Feb/27/2015) with a goal to make a decision whether we should release a specification with the existing BIRDs now or wait until the two major topics get completed. I am writing this email to alert everyone to this discussion topic scheduled for the next meeting, so people who would like to express their opinion on this question would have a chance to do so. We can also use this email thread to "get ready" for that meeting and discuss the pros and cons beforehand. I have a few thoughts on that too, but I will wait with that until the discussion begins to roll. Your comments, suggestions and questions are much appreciated. Thanks, Arpad ========================================================================= -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -------------------------------------------------------------------- |For help or to subscribe/unsubscribe, e-mail mikelabonte@eda-stds.org |or ibis-request@eda-stds.org | |IBIS reflector archives exist under: | | http://www.eda-stds.org/ibis/email_archive/ Recent | http://www.eda-stds.org/ibis/users_archive/ Recent | http://www.eda-stds.org/ibis/email/ E-mail since 1993Received on Fri Feb 6 10:36:44 2015
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