[ibis-interconn] IBIS Interconnect Task Group Oct. 20 Minutes and Oct. 27 Agenda
- From: "Mirmak, Michael" <michael.mirmak@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: IBIS-Interconnect <ibis-interconn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:52:13 -0600
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IBIS INTERCONNECT TASK GROUP MEETING MINUTES AND AGENDA
http://www.eda.org/ibis/interconnect_wip/ (note new URL)
Mailing list: ibis-interconn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
======================================================================
Next Meeting
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
9 AM US Pacific Time
Telephone Bridge Passcode
916-356-2663 5 761-1665
(for international and alternate US numbers, contact Michael Mirmak)
LiveMeeting: https://webjoin.intel.com/?passcode=7611665
Agenda:
- Attendees
- Call for patents
- Review of Minutes
* Oct. 20, 2010
- Opens
- MCP Comments Review and live editing
* Appeal for volunteers
- Agenda for Next Meeting
- Approve Next Meeting Dates:
* Nov. 3, 2010
* Nov. 10, 2010
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Minutes from October 20:
Attendees:
----------
(* denotes present)
Agilent - Radek Biernacki*, John Moore, Ken Wong
Ansoft - Denis Soldo
Cadence Design Systems - Brad Griffin, Terry Jernberg, Taranjit Kukal,
Dennis Nagle
Cisco Systems - Mike LaBonte
Green Streak Programs - Lynne Green
Hewlett-Packard - Rob Elliott
IBM - Greg Edlund
ICT-Lanto - Steven Wong
Intel - Michael Mirmak*
Mentor Graphics Corp. - John Angulo*, Arpad Muranyi*, Vladimir
Dmitriev-Zdorov
Micron Technology - Justin Butterfield, Randy Wolff*
Sigrity - Brad Brim, Raymond Y. Chen, Sam Chitwood, Tao Su
SiSoft - Walter Katz*
Teraspeed Consulting Group - Bob Ross*
========================================================================
No patents were declared. No opens were raised.
Michael Mirmak reviewed ARs given in the last ISS discussion. He reported
that the latest Synopsys HSPICE* documentation and parser implementation
does not disallow either:
- the $ character starting a comment line
- the * character preceding an in-line comment
Arpad Muranyi asked whether IBIS-ISS will document the same behavior.
Michael responded with a suggestion for a caution or warning. Bob Ross
Suggested that the document note the behavior, as using cautions/warnings
means tabulating what the document considers caution-able or warn-able.
Michael reported on what is considered a token in IBIS-ISS, where token
really groups element names, nodes, expressions and arguments into a common
concept. Walter Katz added that the = character is a token delimiter and that
sometimes
+ and /, etc. can be delimiters. The original source documentation makes
this clear. Michael added "parameter" in some contexts is the text
"DC" or "Z0" which ISS calls arguments. Walter suggested using the definition
of token used for other languages. Radek noted that a string is split into
tokens by delimiters, including within expressions.
Current definition in source documents is as follows:
"- An input token is any item in the input file that [the tool]
recognizes. Input token delimiters are: tab, blank (whitespace), comma (,),
and parentheses ( ).
- Single (') or double quotes (") delimit expressions and filenames.
...
Note: The equal sign (=) it is a token delimiter in the sense only that
when you define a parameter, both the parameter name and
parameter value are considered tokens, so the '=' is a token."
The team discussed the rules for single- vs. double-quotes. Arpad requested
Specific rules for quotation usage. The source documentation suggests
that single-quotes are only permitted format for str(...) parameters.
Michael noted that not much work would be left for the document once these
issues and some formatting problems were resolved.
The team reviewed Arpad's comments on IBIS-ISS.
In Arpad's comments, statements are noted as being up to 1024 characters long;
Is this *lines* or really *statements*? Michael responded that lines was
the correct limitation.
Arpad noted a statement requiring values to be floating point doubles. This
should be removed according to Radek and Bob as an unnecessary limitation on
the engine processing IBIS-ISS input. Walter added that the engine can also
alternately process the values as strings (only using numbers in calculations).
On parameters and expressions, the team noted that the document needs to
mention explicitly
that these are only evaluated once, at parsing time, not iteratively or
dynamically.
The document should not allow non-linear element definitions for R, for
example,
based on voltages elsewhere. Similarly, examples using the HERTZ parameter
definition and V(abs(1)) should be removed. Walter noted that this means only
supporting constants and parameters in expressions.
Revision 0.7 will be issued with the above changes.
ARs
Michael Mirmak: The phrase "values may be numeric" in parameters should mention
strings.
Michael Mirmak: are expressions tokenized within single- and/or double-quotes?
Michael Mirmak: Shouldn't the T/U element not allow ZO vs. Z0?
Michael Mirmak: Change lines to statements in 1024 character limit
Michael Mirmak: no nodes, no elements shall be allowed in parameter expressions
------
Arpad's original notes are enclosed below, for the record.
pg. 10 "...statement may be 1024 characters long"
Does this mean that any element can't have more than 1024 characters in
it, even if it is on multiple lines, or does it mean that each line of an
element description that spans multiple lines can be no longer than 1024
characters?
IBIS may be haunting me here with the line length limitation, but I thought
that 1024 was a line length limit, not statement limit.
pg. 12 Shouldn't the T/U element not allow ZO Z0?
pg. 16 "In addition, single (') or double quotes (") delimit tokens used
as expressions and filenames." I am a little confused about when single and
double quotes are used. Is that described anywhere? The table on pg. 15
says the same for both " and '...
pg. 16 If instance names can be 1024 long, how is it that a statement can
also be (only) 1024 character long? Doesn't this contradict each other?
pg. 18 on the bottom doesn't mention that parameters may also have string
values...
pg. 19 if parameter names are allowed to be 1024 long, how does it work with
the rule that a statement can't be more than 1024 long? Same for node name
later on the page, and element name on the bottom of the page.
pg. 22 "All parameter values in IBIS-ISS are IEEE double floating point
numbers" This is not completely true since we can have strings too.
I think it should say "All numeric parameters..."
pg. 23 "In IBIS-ISS, an algebraic expression, with quoted strings, may
replace any parameter." We need to mention when these are evaluated. As far
as I remember, we said that they are evaluated once at parsing time, and not
dynamically at each iteration.
pg. 23 Why do we have that sentence there for the "\\" and "\"? We already
explained that somewhere else...
pg. 30 "An include file can contain nested .INCLUDE calls to itself or"...
Really? Isn't' that going to be an infinite parsing loop?
pg. 30 "If the path starts from the current working directory, IBIS-ISS may
also find the .INCLUDE file, but prints a warning." I don't understand this.
Is this a relative path? Why is a warning necessary for this case?
pg. 30 "The file path, plus the file name, may be up to 16 characters long."
That sounds an awful short limitation...
pg. 32 If .model is used for W and S elements only, why do we show it for a
Resistor on pg. 28?
pg. 33 Subcircuit definition: "or in a calling subcircuit at any level above"
kind of violates the locality rules we established for global nodes are
parameters. If a subcircuit is defined in the top level netlist, is it visible
inside an ISS subcircuit?
pg. 39 Need to check Zo...
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