Meeting 51 Minutes

Teleconference, May 11, 2009

A quorum of six out of nine voting members present. Six non-voting members are also present. Attendance and voter status indicated on the roster web page.

Monday, May 11, 2009, 1600 UTC; 9:00 am Pacific Daylight Time

Attendees

• Voting members (6/9 voting members present)

  • Andrew Piziali

  • Dave Von Bank

  • Mark Strickland

  • Darren Galpin

  • Joe Hupcey

  • Yaron Kashai

• Non-voting members

  • Brett Lammers

  • Mike McNamara

  • Mike Bartley

  • Srinivasan “Srini” Venkataramanan

  • Stylianos Diamantidis

  • Tucker Brown

1. Call to order meeting 51 on May 11 at 9:05 am PDT (1605 UTC)

• Darren reminded members to mail a message to “rollcall@ieee1647.org” in order to record their meeting attendance.

2. Approval of April 20 meeting 50 minutes

• Solicit motion to approve the minutes

• Andrew motioned

• Yaron seconded

• Minutes approved

3. Status update

• Officer Election

  • Secretary .... to be appointed

  • Darren asked for a volunteer for secretary – please e-mail Darren or reflector if you wish to volunteer.

  • Andrew volunteered to take minutes for this meeting

• Action Items

  • 11 May 09

    • Darren – will post call-for-participation letters in the Yahoo! Specman group and Verification Guild

    • Srini – will post call-for-participation letters in the Yahoo! ASIC design group and the Bangalore universities

    • Joe H. – will post call-for-participation letter to Cadence customers through their AE contacts

    • Mike M. – will write call-for-participation letter to John Cooley for posting on DeepChip

  • 1 Dec 08

    • Joe H. – will identify a driver customer for each language addition on the table and ask them to join the eWG and contribute both labor and, if necessary, funding. — Pending

      • 11 May: Brett and Joe now have access to the support database so they can search for relevant customers for each features. They will be working with their AEs on this. Brett has not yet figured how to extract the needed information but it will be labor intensive.

Andy: Can enhancement requests be isolated from the support database?

Joe: Yes, but we still need to read each request to determine what feature(s) is in question.

• 13 Apr: Joe asked Alan Ahlschlager if he and Brett Lammers can access the support database.

• 6 Mar: Joe is coordinating this with CDNS Support, correlating enhancement requests with P1647-2010 features. Expected to be a somewhat slow process as service requests are not currently categorized by language construct.

• TLM Ports

  • Implemented as an “early adopter” feature in Specman

  • When should an e language feature be standardized? Before any implementation exists? When a single draft implementation exists? After an adopted mature implementation is available? When multiple implementations exist?

Brett: Yaron and I have been discussing this. How should newer features be drafted? With respect to TLM ports, they are new in Specman but stable in general in other tools.

Yaron: I have been tasked with finding a customer that is using TLM ports. There are no customers yet using this feature. Should we be leading the standard or waiting for the successful use of the feature in the field.

Andrew: When in the time spectrum should we standardize a feature?

Stylianos: 80% of our time in other standards is inventing, 20% is codifying. I recommend being on the leading edge. However, TLM is a well-understood concept and feature so I suspect there is little risk here.

Brett: If the LRM always lags a de facto standard—e.g. Specman—what is the draw for others to join the eWG.

Yaron: Our WG members do not have a full understanding of the field use of e language features.

Andrew: The temporal coverage proposal has no implementation but may have merit.

Joe H.: We ought to codify TLM for 2010.

Stylianos: I don't think TLM falls in the 80/20 category I described above.

• P1647 Call-For-Participation Letter

  • Final draft

  • Channels

    • ASIC Design Yahoo! Group – Srini

    • Cadence AE customers – Joe H.

    • CDN Live!

      • Munich – ?

      • San Jose – Stylianos has a proposal for P1647-2010

    • Cool Verification — JL

    • DeepChip – Mac will write John Cooley

    • DVClub

      • Bristol – Serrie announced and picked up Jonathon Bromley as a member

      • Bangalore – Srini

    • Inactive P1647 WG members

    • Specman Yahoo! Group - Darren

    • Universities

      • Bangalore – Srini

• Task Forces

  • Constraints (lead: Mark Strickland)

    • Named checks

    • Named constraints

    • Type constraints

  • Coverage (lead: Andrew Piziali)

    • Temporal coverage

    • Reviewed 2004 proposal

      • Data and temporal values are equally contribute to the definition of a coverage model

      • Allows independent specification of attribute sampling times and model correlation times through separate events

      • Specification requires substantial elaboration

  • Macros (lead: Matan Vax)

    • Define-as-computed

  • Ports (lead: Yaron Kashai)

    • Interface ports

    • TLM ports as in SystemC

    • Brett will contribute to this task force

    • Yaron has not yet found a customer user of the feature

    • This is a short specification so Yaron and Brett will write this

  • Types (lead: Mike Bartley)

    • Parameterized types

    • Real data type

    • Mike has been trying to reach Henry Von Bank

    • Dave Von Bank will forward contact information

    • Mike has been reviewing the specifications and is ready to collaborate with Henry Von Bank

• Schedule

  • Summer '09

    • Begin review of technical contributions

  • Fall '09

    • Integrate changes into LRM

    • Decide what features is and what is out

  • Spring 2010

    • Ballot P1647-2010

4. Other business

• Any other business?

  • Al Kolka (Cadence) is still interested in editing for the eWG. He edits Specman documentation.

• Mail a message to rollcall@ieee1647.org!

5. Call for essential patents

• The IEEE-SA updated the patent policy effective April 2008

• The details are available in updated slide set at http://standards.ieee.org/board/pat/pat-slideset.pdf (See "Patent related" from the IEEE 1647 home page, "Slides About IEEE Patent Policy").

• If you believe that any patent claims are essential patent claims, please inform the working group. Review the posted slides for more information.

6. Next meeting

• June 8 at 9 am PDT (1600 UTC)

7. Adjourn

• Stylianos motioned

• Mike M. seconded

• Motion approved

• Meeting adjourned at 9:40 am PDT (16:40 UTC)