Minutes, IBIS Quality Committee

11 October 2011

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:

- None

AR Review:

- Mike post AMI checklist to archive
  - Just done

- Greg update AMI checklist items 2.1 through 2.3
  - No report

- Mike add descriptions to AMI checklist
  - No changes made

- Mike add QUAILs to Mantis
  - Done
  - Bob: I couldn't get in to Mantis
  - Mike: The first page requires a login
    - I may need help reconfiguring

New items:

Mike showed the AMI checklist:
- Mike: BUG 104 was marked "not a bug" in the last Open Forum
- Bob discussed bug processing issues
  - BUG122 was difficult because it applied to all many settings
  - This was about errors interpreting Vmeas and Rmeas
  - It can be difficult to get to the root problem
  - Michael Mirmak filed a bug on the Touchstone parser

Mike showed the [Model Spec] section of IBIS 5.0
- Bob: The issue was making it so the overrides were correct
  - It should be obvious but is not clear in the spec
- Mike highlighted a sentence on page 42
  "If one rising or falling subparameter is used, ..."
  - This makes no sense.
- Eckhard: If you use Cref rising/falling then you also should
  use Rref rising/falling and Vref rising/falling.
  - The working is strange.
- Bob: This is a tack-on to a tack-on to a tack-on to the spec
- Mike: Is this a quality issue?
- Bob: I don't think anyone uses it

Mike returned to the AMI checklist:
- Mike: 2.4 through 2.6 are related
  - They are about multiple instances stepping on files
- Bob: It's confusing unless you know how the AMI models work
- Mike: It could be reduced to one check
  - Multiple AMI instances should not conflict
  - These checks could be sub-bullets

- Bob: Check 2.3 should be a business decision
  - We should not be endorsing operating systems
- Mike: Solaris seems to be falling off
- Eckhard: Solaris is a form of Unix
- Bob: The check should be that supported OSes are listed
- Eckhard: I need to know which OSes a model runs on
  - We find out too late when it doesn't work
- Mike: Need to start changing the document instead of adding comments.
  - 2.4 through 2.6 are now 2.4
- Bob: We can suggest that Windows and Linux are widely used

- Mike: 2.5 (formerly 2.7) "Unrecognized parameters" was already discussed
  - This is a model issue
  - It should be very easy to test, just create a parameter called "junk"
- Bob: It could be an unrecognized Out parameter
  - That would be a tool issue

- Mike: Back to 2.4, most of the work to prevent problems could
  be done by the EDA tool
  - We can address what the model should and should not do
  - In a crosstalk simulations there may be 5 of the same TX, 5 of the same RX
  - Models need to generate unique file names as needed
- Bob: Often different vendors are used for TX and RX
  - You don't have control over the names
- Mike: There is a question of how much the EDA tool does vs. the model
- Mike: Separate simulations are often run by a farm in separate directories
  - There could be conflicts with other shared resources such as memory and sockets

Mike showed BIRD 121.1 IBIS-AMI New Reserved Parameters for Data Management:
- Mike: This proposes DLLid to help models remain separated
- Bob: That may help in the future but there are solutions now
  - It may be that models bypass the problem today
- Mike: We could say a quality model would use the DLLid parameter
- Bob: We can't have that in the spec
  - Tools can handle this problem now
- Mike: Tools could copy entire directories to keep instances separate
- Bob: Do we have a problem with this now?
- Mike: Greg may have some anecdotes
  - When you have this kind of problem it can be very hard to debug
- Bob: We can't rewrite the spec
- Mike: True, we will not have checks requiring BIRDs
  - We don't have to require DLLid, but just that there is no conflict
  - There might be tool specific troubles though
  - Someone needs to work it out so it always works for users
- Bob: The audience for quality checks is model makers, but users can do it too

AR: Mike post latest AMI checklist version to work archive

Next meetings:
- Next meetings Oct 18 and Oct 25

Oct 18 agenda:
- Continued IBIS-AMI checklist review

Meeting ended at 12:11 Eastern Time.