IEEE P1076.1 Working Group Telco Meeting Minutes - July 14, 2009 8am PDT (15:00 GMT)

Status: Approved by WG on 18 August 2009.

Attendees

• Ken Bakalar
• Ernst Christen (chair, meeting convener)
• Joachim Haase
• John Shields
• David Smith
• Alain Vachoux (note taker)

Agenda

1. Call to order
2. Approval of agenda
3. Administrative issues
   1. Recent activities
   2. Call for participation
4. Review of IEEE patent policy
5. Revision Ballot of IEEE Std 1076.1.1
6. Planning for next revision of IEEE Std 1076.1
7. Next meeting
8. AOB
9. Adjourn

1. Call to order on July 14, 2009 at 8:03 PDT

Ernst welcomed the participants and started presenting the meeting slides.

2. Approval of Agenda

Agenda unanimously approved.

3. Administrative Issues

• Slide #4: WG Status
  • John mentioned that, even if Accellera is entity-based, the IEEE WG to which an Accellera approved standard is transferred is not forced to be also entity-based, although this is encouraged.
• Slide #5: WG Membership
  • A new fresh WG roster will be build from the first next WG vote.
• Slide #6: Web Site
  • New Twiki web site under construction. Some information moved and updated from previous web site.
  • Alain to tell David when the old URL (http://www.eda.org/vhdl-ams) can be redirected to the Twiki home and the eda.org page can be updated with the new URL.
• Slide #9: Call for Participation
  • Ernst proposed to also contact former balloters of 1076.1 and 1076.1.1.
  • John proposed to also add the balloters of 1076, even if they may not be primarily concerned with AMS extensions. Approved.
  • Alain proposed to also consider the ECSI organization. Approved.

4. Review of IEEE Patent Policy

• Ernst presented the IEEE Patent Policy slides.
• Alain asked if the slides have to be presented at each meeting. Ernst suggested that only the first slide would be needed.
• John mentioned that it is enough to make a statement at the beginning of each meeting that there is a policy and everybody can find the information on the IEEE SA web site (http://standards.ieee.org/board/pat/pat-slideset.pdf) or on the WG web site.

5. Revision Ballot of IEEE Std 1076.1.1

• Ernst will initiate a working group vote on the draft P1076.1.1 PAR in a few days with a 14 day response time.

6. Planning for Next Revision of IEEE Std 1076.1

• IP protection
  • John mentioned the work of the P1735 WG whose charter is to develop industry interoperability rules. Pragmatic approach, easy-to-implement rules. Digital rights to be addressed next year.
  • Ernst asked about the implications on HDLs.
  • John replied that this would be in the form of modified or new pragmas.
  • David stressed that P1735 cannot change VHDL or (System)Verilog standards.
  • John replied that this would be only recommendations to other standards. Actually, there is a common set of members in P1735, P1076 and P1364/1800.
  • David raised the issue of P1735 and P1076 being (re)issued at the same time.
  • Ernst concluded that 1076.1 will first include the IP support offered by 1076-2008.
• VHPI
  • Need to review the status of previous work on VHPI for VHDL-AMS (work from Martin Vlach).
  • David proposed to ask for possible donation from EDA vendors who have done some work in this domain.
• Generic types and packages
  • More detailed analysis on the implications to 1076.1 is required.
• PSL
  • David thought this should be a separate issue when upgrading 1076.1 to 1076-2008. Should be considered as an extension to 1076.1.
  • Ken stressed that the effort to support Verilog-AMS assertions is not primarily interesting. It is better to consider extending PSL to AMS.
  • David suggested to consider SystemVerilog assertions.
  • John noticed that the incorporation of 1076-2008 will only concern the digital context and there should be some provision to prevent the analog context to be included in PSL statements.
• External names should include quantities.
• The importance mentioned in slides 15 to 20 is Ernst's perspective. This should be anyway determine through a WG poll/vote.
• Mixed netlists
  • Ken mentioned that each EDA vendor has proprietary means to support automatic insertion of interface (conversion) elements.
• Parameter sweep
  • David stressed that this is more a tool (control language) issue: amount of re-elaboration, incremental elaboration.
• Table-driven modeling
  • Joachim made a proposal, but no progress on that for the moment.
• Pass function name as parameter
  • John mentioned that 1076-2008 only considers static passing at elaboration time.
  • Ernst confirmed that the requirement is to have static definition only.
• Unified use of SPICE models
  • Joachim reported on VDA efforts. Only a subset of SPICE primitives has been developed (see the SPICE2VHD library) following the guidelines described in this proposal document and the same effort done for Verilog-AMS. See also the full VDA library available at http://fat-ak30.eas.iis.fraunhofer.de/mb/index_en.html.
    • There is still the need to understand the scope and the objectives before considering the integration in 1076.1.
• Unified C interface
  • David suggested to consider the Direct C interface in SystemVerilog.
• Support of HIL simulators
  • Early requirements have been defined by Eduard Moser ( text document of Dec. 2, 1999).
• Standard symbol format
  • David reported on the SVG-based symbol exchange format. Currently defines a mapping from 1076.1 language elements to SVG. Difficult to include graphical information (attributes) in 1076.1.
• Frequency-domain modeling
  • Joachim's proposal to be presented at FDL'09.
• Planning of 1076.1 revision
  • David stressed the need to define a prioritization of importance.
  • John proposed to include the revision process in the PAR, e.g., what is in scope and what is out of scope.
  • Ernst thought that we need some perspective on that before we can include it in the PAR.
  • John thought that having champions does matter, but the working group community must agree on the importance, the scope and the objectives.
  • David suggested that we may need feedback from outside the working group, e.g., VDA, etc.
  • John suggested also briefing the DASC.
  • Ernst replied that he is regularly attending DASC meetings, giving updates on the WG activities.

7. Next Meeting

• Ernst proposed to have a telco each first Tuesday of the month at 3pm GMT. Approved.
• Alain to organize a face-to-face meeting at FDL'09 (Sept. 22-24). Telco will be required. Internet access also, if possible.

8. AOB

None.

9. Adjourn

Ernst adjourned the meeting at 9:15 PDT.