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IBIS INTERCONNECT MODELING AD HOC TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES AND AGENDA
http://www.eda.org/ibis/adhoc/interconnect/
Mailing list: ibis-interconn@freelists.org<mailto:ibis-interconn@freelists.org>
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Next Meeting
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 (No meeting on February 3)
9 AM US Pacific Time
Telephone Bridge Passcode
916-356-2663 5 115-4363
(for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak)
Live Meeting: http://tinyurl.com/yzo768q
or:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/sisoft/join?id=M462B6&role=attend&pw=P9%3D8%3BP%277b
Agenda:
- Attendence
- Call for patents
- Opens
- TBD - Sparse Matrix Mapping proposal - Draft 10 review
- Other topics to be determined
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Minutes from January 27, 2010:
Attendees:
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(* denotes present)
Agilent - Radek Biernacki*, John Moore, Ken Wong
Ansoft - Denis Soldo
Cadence Design Systems - Terry Jernberg, Brad Griffin
Green Streak Programs - Lynne Green
Hewlett-Packard - Rob Elliott
IBM - Greg Edlund*
Intel - Michael Mirmak
Mentor Graphics Corp. - John Angulo*, Vladimir Dmitriev-Zdorov
Micron Technology - Randy Wolff
Sigrity - Sam Chitwood, Raymond Y. Chen, Tao Su, Brad Brim*
SiSoft - Walter Katz*
Teraspeed Consulting Group - Bob Ross*
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No patents were announced.
Opens - None
SPARSE MATRIX DRAFT 9
Walter Katz brought up Draft 9, and the changes were accepted. Bob
Ross mentioned in the two examples that the argument for [Number of
Sparse Labels] needed to be on the same line, and Draft 10 will have
that change.
SPARSE MATRIX LABEL RULES
Bob Ross introduced the nomenclature for integer-labels by stating
that they are restricted in the document to sequential integers.
Several people wanted to generalize this into any string of characters.
Brad Brim had shown this in previous presentations, and Bob showed
Brad's e-mail arguments and his presentation to illustrate this choice.
Meeting particpants expressed their views, and most favored character
string labels or were neutral but leaning toward character strings.
Radek Biernacki had also favored character strings or just using the
colon character in past discussions. Bob and others indicated that
there were no technical concerns regarding either choice. The case
for using integers was that the integer provided a direct mapping to
the network data complex column containing the data pair. This mapping
can still be done by using the position of the character labels. The
consensus was to accept character strings (or null character) along
with the colon ":" at the end as a valid label.
Since Brad advocated character strings, he accepted an AR to continue
editing Draft 10 to revise the label rules, currently based on integers
and integer-labels. Bob proposed changing the name "integer-label" tp
"sparse-label" in the document. This had mentioned in previous
meetings, and the name "sparse-label" follows more naturally as an
argument associated with the keyword [Number of Sparse Labels]. The
name "sparse-label" was accepted as a general editorial change to
Draft 10 for Brad to make.
Another of Brad's tasks is to remove existing rules based on integers
or sequencing of integers.
We discussed briefly other rules such as:
A "sparse-label" is any text string that ends with a colon character.
The colon character can serve by itself as a label (corresponding
to a null character string before the label.
No spaces (or other separators) are allowed for sparse-labels
We may decide later to provided restrictions on the label content
such as alpha-nunmerical characters only along with dash and
underbar, but we also noted that the ending colon of a text
string could be sufficient identification under the [Sparse Matrix
Mapping] keyword. So other useful characters including commas
and paranthesis could be accepted.
No rules are needed concernging repeated label names since the
position of the label under [Sparse Matrix Mapping] is the only
information needed or processed by a tool. This also supports using
just the colon character by itself as a label.
Brad plans to edit Draft 10 and create rules for sparse-labels based
on our discussion so far. This will serve as a base-line for further
discussion.
AR - Brad provide Draft 10 with markup to Bob with character-based
sparse-labels for uploading/distribution before the next meeting.
BINARY FORMAT
Greg Edlund had sent a binary format example to the Interconnect Task
Group mailing list, and Bob confirmed that all attendees received it.
Walter commented and confirmed with Greg Edlund that the binary file
should have also been named microstrip.s4p. For binary format, the
number of ports needs to be known in order to process the binary content.
The easiest way to do this in Touchstone 1.0 is to require the existing
extension option of .s<n>p when the file has binary content.
A few more questions and suggestions were discussed including allowing
the "0" following the binary command to be replaced with another
character or string for big-endian/little-endian information. Bob
also mentioned that the number of ports could be considered here, but
this would change the structure of Touchstone.
In response to Radek's question, the binary format cannot be used
for a file that contains noise data information. Because the noise
data addition is restricted to 2-port files, this is not a serious
limitation.
Walter mentioned that a publicly avaiable reader/writer similar
to tschk2 or ibischk5 would be helpful.
We will continue discussing the binary format and eventually generate
a proposal (or TSIRD).
NEXT MEETING
Because most people will be attending DesignCon 2010 next week,
the next Interconnect Task Group meeting is scheduled on Wednesday,
February 10, 2010. Draft 10 will be reviewed, focusing mostly on
the new sparse-label content.