Minutes, IBIS Quality Committee

28 Feb 2012

11:00-12:00 EST (08:00-09:00 PST)

ROLL CALL

Cisco Systems:                  Tony Penaloza
Ericsson:                     * Anders Ekholm
Green Streak Programs:          Lynne Green
Huawei Technologies:            Guan Tao
IBM:                            Bruce Archambeault
                                Greg Edlund
IOMethodology:                * Lance Wang
Mentor Graphics:                John Angulo
Micron Technology:              Moshiul Haque,
                                Randy Wolff
Nokia Siemens Networks:       * Eckhard Lenski
QLogic Corp.:                   James Zhou
Signal Consulting Group:        Tim Coyle
Signal Integrity Software     * Mike LaBonte
Teraspeed Consulting Group:   * Bob Ross
Texas Instruments:              Pavani Jella

Everyone in attendance marked by *

NOTE: "AR" = Action Required.

-----------------------MINUTES ---------------------------
Mike LaBonte conducted the meeting.

Call for opens and IBIS related patent disclosures:

- Mike: Unable to meet next week

AR Review:

- Mike update checklist 
  - Done

New items:

Mike showed the IBIS free tools page:
- Mike: Have there been support requests for s2ibis3?
- Lance: There are some installation requests
  - Also some enhancement requests
  - Spectre support is a problem
  - Many want to know how to use it with ODT
- Mike: Is s2ibis still being used for production?
- Lance: Many have their own tools or commercial tools

Bob: AMI quality remains a useful project
  - The parser is the best bet for that
  - Money is an issue
- Mike: Major releases are taking longer, so income is lower
  - Should 5.2 be 6.0?
- Bob: I would advocate that
  - We have an accounting problem too
- Mike showed the ibischk5 page
- Mike: It has been released 7 times, purchased once
- Bob: We sold 15 licenses so far
  - One new member may join the forum
  - Synopsys bought Magna, so now they only need one license
  - Mentor acquired InnovEDA
  - People are still finding bugs
  - Cadence found one, they must be using the parser

Mike: Could we add any features to sell more parsers?
- Bob: Some say we should raise price
  - Another idea is to charge for IBISCHK
  - We are stabilizing IBISCHK
  - Some companies are ahead of the spec
- Mike: That may stop them from buying the parser
  - The AMI format should not suffer that problem

Bob: People do not have the same understanding the spec now
- Mike: That sounds like what Greg's AMI checklist was addressing
- Bob: Models from one vendor do not work in other tools
  - The 5.0 spec is ambiguous
- Mike: It is also insufficient for some features that must be modeled

Mike: Do we ever get feedback on the parser code style?
- Anders: Agilent reported something 4 years ago
  - Also the error number idea
- Bob: We didn't do the Agilent request

Mike showed IBISCHK bug 132:
- Bob: [Model Selector] within [Notes] causes a crash
- Mike: This is partly because we don't have [End Notes]

- Mike: Is the Agilent request a numbered bug?
- Bob: No
  - We get a lot of requests that we don't number

Mike: Should we do a survey about the usefulness of the parser?
- Lance: No one will buy if the checker tool is free
  - It is too easy to write your own parser
  - Those who buy are really just supporting IBIS
- Bob: People who write their own tend to get it wrong
  - They also add their own features
- Mike: We are supporting an important tool by contributions
  - It's like public radio: free, but you can pay if you want
  - Should we raise open forum membership dues?
- Lance: JEITA has high fees but they give good benefits
  - Some documents and data are for members only
  - There is IBIS quality data like simulator comparisons, for example
  - The membership is something like $10,000

- Parser price $2500 x 15 = $37500
  - We have paid about $21,000 for 5.0 work
- Bob: We will not make it past 5.1

Next meetings:
- Next meetings Mar 20 and Apr 17

Mar 20 agenda:
- Discuss IBISCHK5 parser expansion for AMI

Meeting ended at 12:38 Eastern Time.

