[ibis-interconn] Binary Touchstone Specification

  • From: "Walter Katz" <wkatz@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "IBIS-Interconnect" <ibis-interconn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Gregory R Edlund" <gedlund@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:43:28 -0500

All,

I took a little liberty and mad some minor modifications to Greg?s original
specification


Binary format touchstone files as defined by IBIS Touchstone 2.x add the
statement to indicate binary format, the immediately following data is in
binary instead of ASCII.  :

       % BINARY DL
       % BINARY DB
       % BINARY FL
       % BINARY FB
       % BINARY ML
       % BINARY MB

The format specifier convention is as follows :
      D : double
      F : float
      M : double freq, float data
      L : little-endian
      B : big-endian

Thus DL is double, little-endian.

The above line can be followed by a \n or a \r\n to indicate newline.
Immediately following the newline sequence is one pad 0 byte which indicates
the following data is binary format numbers.



In addition to the above codes DL, DB, FL, FB, ML, MB we can add

FFL FDL SQL DFL DDL DQL QFL QDL QQL FFB FDB FQB DFB DDB DQB QSB QDB QQB

The conventions for these new codes would be
First Character Precision of Frequency
F Single Precision 32 bits
D Double Precision 62 bits
Q Quad Precision 128 bits
Second Character Precision of Data
F Single Precision 32 bits
D Double Precision 62 bits
Q Quad Precision 128 bits
Third Character Little/Big Endian
L Little Endian
B Big Endian

So QDB would be 128 bit frequency, 64 bit data, big endian.

The following cases would be identical
DL     DDL
DB     DDB
FL     FFL
FB     FFL
ML     DFL
MB     DFB

An if memory serves me correctly, the only other things were that there
would be no [End] termination record for the Network Data, and that 2-Port
Touchstone Files cannot have noise data when using the % BINARY option.

Walter

Walter Katz
303.449-2308
Mobile 720.333-1107
wkatz@xxxxxxxxxx
www.sisoft.com

Other related posts: