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IBIS INTERCONNECT TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES AND AGENDA

http://www.eda.org/ibis/interconnect_wip/

Mailing list: ibis-interconn@freelists.org
Archives at http://www.freelists.org/archive/ibis-interconn/

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Next Meeting
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
9 AM US Pacific Time

               Telephone     Bridge   Passcode
              916-356-2663     92     443-3339

(for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak)

LiveMeeting: 




Agenda:
- Attendees
- Call for patents
- Review of July 6 Meeting Minutes
- Agenda & Opens
- Proposal to release Touchstone 2.1 with only filed TSIRDs
- MCP Plans
- Agenda for Next Meeting
- Approve Next Meeting Dates:
  * July 20
  * July 27 (?; MM may not be available)

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Minutes from July 6, 2011

Attendees:
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(* denotes present)
Agilent                    - Radek Biernacki*
Ansoft                     - Denis Soldo
Cadence Design Systems     - Terry Jernberg, Brad Griffin, Dennis Nagle, Taranjit Kukal
Cisco Systems              - Mike LaBonte
IBM                        - Greg Edlund
ICT-Lanto                  - Steven Wong
Intel                      - Michael Mirmak*
Mentor Graphics Corp.      - John Angulo*, Arpad Muranyi*
Micron Technology          - Justin Butterfield*, Randy Wolff*
Sigrity                    - Brad Brim
SiSoft                     - Walter Katz*
Teraspeed Consulting Group - Bob Ross*
Xilinx                     - Ray Anderson*

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No patents were announced.

During Opens, Bob Ross mentioned two additional proposals related to IBIS-ISS:
* (from Arpad Muranyi et al) adding support for .if/.elseif/.endif
* (from Walter Katz) the suffix "A" is "atto" except when "AMP" is used, 
  forcing units to "amperes"

The team reviewed IBIS-ISS review draft 1.4.  A single issue was raised by
Bob Ross: on the markup copy p. 54 and p. 58 show two different font sizes on 
the H(s) equation.  

Other issues discussed:

- Arpad Muranyi and Radek Biernacki noted that the "MEG/Mili/M" suffices 
  will produce the same atto/amp issue as discussed above. Walter Katz 
  suggested that the Open Forum may discuss this.  Bob Ross noted that 
  changes to this portion breaks existing SPICE tools.  Radek added that 
  whether "amps" or "amperes" will cause different behaviors is unclear.

- Michael Mirmak noted that the source material describing if/elseif/endif 
  have been checked and would include only two pages of changes.   Arpad 
  replied that he could accept waiting for an IBIS-ISS 1.1 for these features.
  Radek noted that this was originally deferred and that is should be 
  discussed in the Open Forum.

- Michael raised the problem of version control.  No version control exists
  in any SPICE implementation currently known.  This may be needed if
  features are added or changed in updates to IBIS-ISS.  Arpad suggested that 
  at least one SPICE tool uses the format yyyy.mm (year, month) for releases.  
  Bob suggested that the document include version, but wondered if every IC 
  vendor needed version control.  Michael suggested ".version=xx" as a useful 
  alternative that may or may not cause existing SPICE tools to crash.  Bob 
  replied that this needs checking, to ensure that ".version" results in a 
  warning only.  Also, he asked whether this option would be placed at the 
  netlist level or at the subcircuit level.

Arpad and Radek moved to release IBIS-ISS 1.4 to IBIS Open Forum. Bob amended 
the motion to cover the H(s) font change requested.  The motion was approved 
with no objections.  Michael noted that the updated document will be review
draft 1.5.  He will release the document to the Open Forum through the 
appropriate reflectors.

The team discussed Touchstone 2.1.  Michael proposed that only the submitted 
TSIRDs be included in a released Touchstone 2.1.  Bob Ross agreed, adding that 
the binary features should be added as a separate section, while the
sparse matrix section could probably be added in-line with existing text.

Document issues include example and equation renumbering. 
Radek asked whether the renumbering should be executed through formal TSIRDs.
Michael asked whether Touchstone 2.1 should include port-to-node mapping plus 
links to IBIS and/or IBIS-ISS.  Should this wait until an Touchstone 3.0?

Arpad replied that he needed to talk offline with several folks regarding if/elseif
support in IBIS-ISS and how it would interact with Touchstone.  Bob noted that
sparse matrices are great reductions of content as-is and so could be used as
a method for mapping.  

Walter Katz suggested simply closing the document and voting it out to the IBIS
Open Forum.  He added that the document still includes two deficiencies: 

- no method for documenting nodes-to-ports (see comments at DesignCon from 
  Eric Bogatin)
- no transfer-function-based descriptions (only frequency-domain-based 
  descriptions are supported)

Bob Ross moved to defer the decision until next week.  No objections were raised.  
The meeting was adjourned.