IEEE P1076.1 Working Group Telco Meeting Minutes - April 13, 2010 8am PST (17:00 CET)

Status: approved by WG on July 8, 2010.

Attendees

• Peter Ashenden
• Ernst Christen (chair, meeting convener)
• Zhichao Deng
• William Goodwin
• Joachim Haase
• David Smith
• Alain Vachoux (note taker)
• John Willis
• Yaseen Zaidi

Agenda

• Call to order
• Approval of agenda
• Administrative issues
• Survey update
• Project updates
• Next steps and next meetings
• AOB
• Adjourn

1. Call to order on April 13, 2010 at 8am PST

Ernst welcomed the participants and started presenting the meeting slides.

2. Approval of Agenda

Motion from Peter. David seconded. Agenda unanimously approved without modifications.

3. Administrative Issues

• Minutes of February 9, 2010
  Minutes have not been apparently formally approved at the March 9 meeting.
  Motion from David. John seconded. Minutes unanimously approved without modifications.
• Minutes of March 9, 2010
  Motion from David. John seconded. Minutes unanimously approved with one modification: add Joachim in attendees list .
• Publicity: No time to make progress.
• 1076.1.1 revision
  Ernst will make a WG call for approval in the next couple of days.
• 1076.1 draft PAR
  Ernst asked the IEEE IP rights group for clarifications. Still waiting for a response. There might be also issues with the integration of 1076.1.1.
• Review of IEEE patent policy
  Ernst offered a review of the IEEE patent policy. Participants waived the review.

4. Survey Update

Five more responses after a second round of request to VHDL-AMS vendors. Three top topics: frequency-domain modeling, table-driven modeling, mixed netlists.

Steve Grout suggested another project on sensitivity and handling of parameter tolerances. Ernst asked for clarifications. He will put more detailed information on the Twiki site as soon as they are available. David suggested to consider the work done in SAE on the support of statistical (Monte-Carlo) modeling and analysis in VHDL-AMS ( SAE Std J2748-2006).

David suggested to wait for possible more responses from industry. Ernst replied that he has no idea how to improve the participation to the survey.

All feedback results are available in the Documents section.

5. Project Updates

Ernst invited known project champions to give a first presentation on status and plans.

5.1 VHPI-AMS (Champion: David Smith)

David reported on status and plan. Currently 4 members: David, Zhichao Deng, Yaseen Zaidi, and Peter Ashenden. David sent a call for participation to the mailing list. First meeting on Thursday April 22, 2010 at 8:00am PDT.

[Slide 8: VHPI-AMS Plan] Ernst asked what are the "machine readable packages". David replied that these are all the source codes obtained when downloading the VHDL 2008 LRM: VHPI, testbenches, UML and HTML codes. David will also consider getting the VHDL-AMS code from 1076.1.1 and reusing the material developed by Martin Vlach.

Ernst mentioned possible dependencies with other projects and LRM writing. He will check with Peter for the latter.

Peter mentioned that the current VHPI definition still needs to be updated with the latest VHDL 2008 language changes.

5.2 1076.1.1 Integration (Champion: David Smith)

David reported on status and plan. Currently 4 members: David, Alain Vachoux, Ernst Christen, and Peter Ashenden. David sent a call for participation to the mailing list. First meeting on Thursday April 28, 2010 at 8:00am PDT.

Ernst asked IEEE for a copy of the IEEE Std 260.1-2004 and plans to put a copy in the private document area of the Twiki site. This standard will be useful for defining support for handing compatible units to existing units.

Alain asked if new natures or energy domains are planned to be supported. David replied that a basic requirement is to support compatible units, possibly leading to new nature definitions. Ernst added that it is required to look at what unit systems people are actually using. Maybe SI units are not the main and only one to support. Also we should look at directions defined by IEEE (e.g. exclusive support of metric system?).

5.3 Other LRM Changes (Champion: Ernst Christen)

Ernst reported on status and plan. Currently 3 members: Ernst, Alain Vachoux, and John Willis. As an example of small project proposed by the survey, Ernst mentioned the request fo rmore flexible 'ltf and 'ztf attributes (e.g., non-static coefficients and pole-zero representations). The main dependency is the IEEE Std 1076-2008 LRM. Ernst raised a concern about the new LRM organization and its implications to the 1076.1 material. Ernst asked Peter, as the VHDL 2008 LRM Technical Editor, to provide him the latest LRM text source.

Peter asked whether the 1076.1 revision will be based on 1076-2008. Ernst replied that this is the intent for the main reason to have new VHDL 2008 features also supported in 1076.1 (e.g. IP protection).

Ernst asked John if he had more information to add on the genericity project. John replied that he did not have the time yet to work on it.

5.4 Mixed Netlists (Champion: Ernst Christen)

Ernst reported on status and plan. Currently only one member: Ernst. John Shields was a natural candidate as he previously worked with Ernst on that topic, but John is currently too busy with other standardization projects.

David asked if there is any requirement regarding the consistency or interoperability with the Verilog-AMS approach. He also mentioned specific algorithms used for deciding when/how to split/merge nets. Ernst replied that this is in the plan and that the Verilog-AMS approach has been reviewed when developing the current proposal. Ernst added that there is still a need to review the requirements and to get input from designers about their experiences with the Verilog-AMS approach. Peter offered to provide inputs from his company (ASTC).

5.5 Table-Driven Modeling (Champion: Joachim Haase)

Joachim reported on status and plan. Currently 2 members: Joachim and Alain Vachoux. No apparent dependencies with other projects.

Alain asked whether developing a VHDL(-AMS) prototype package is in the plan. Joachim was not completely clear about that. Ernst stressed the need to have such a package as a project deliverable.

Alain raised a concern about the VHDL(-AMS) tool support for validating such a package. He thought about known limited language coverage in tools that might impact the use of complex data structures or processing algorithms. David stressed that a standard must not be aligned to tool implementations. Ernst added that a prototype implementation package must implement the required, but not necessarily optimized, functionality.

Ernst raised a possible copyright issue with VDA if we reuse their material. Joachim replied that the VDA implementation will be only used for defining requirements. The prototype implementation will start from scratch.

5.6 Vector/Matrix Support (Champion: Zhichao Deng)

Zhichao reported on status and plan. Currently 2 members: Zhichao and David Smith. Dependencies may exist with the PDE support and the frequency-domain modeling projects.

Ernst expressed the need to define requirements and scope.

Alain asked whether developing a VHDL(-AMS) prototype package is in the plan. Zhichao replied that deliverables should be mainly the requirements and possible language change requests for suppporting new syntax and semantics. Ernst suggested considering overloading existing operators (e.g. "*" for inner product) or function calls. He would prefer to stick with a package.

David asked whether such a need has been expressed or similar work has been done in the VHDL 1076 context. He mentioned that vector/matrix support could be also useful for digital applications such as signal processing. Ernst suggested to ask Jim Lewis (IEEE VASG Chair) about that. The project deliverables might be also applicable to non-AMS applications. Ernst also suggested considering developing a generic package as supported in VHDL 2008 (similar to the new floating-point packages).

David wondered whether generic packages could be also useful for table-driven-modeling. Ernst replied that the genericity on types might no be required as table would only handle real values.

5.7 Conclusion

Ernst raised the need to have a champion for the frequency-domain modeling project. He asked for a volunteer in the meeting. Since nobody moved, Ernst proposed to be the project champion. As there has been no objection, Ernst proposed to present the project status and plan at the next meeting.

John asked for clarifications about the genericity project. Ernst replied that this is mainly about extending the new concept of generic types to natures and generic entities.

Alain proposed to arrange the Twiki site for including project related information, especially creating the private areas (a public page introducing the projects is already available). Project champions are expected to populate their respective project pages. David asked Alain to email changes to project champions and also to give guidance about the usage of the public and private pages.

6. Next Steps and Next Meetings

• Publicity: To be worked on further.
• 1076.1.1 revision: WG review and approval. Forming the IEEE balloting group.
• 1076.1 draft PAR: WG review and approval.
• Next meetings: Tuesday May 11, 2010, 8am PST. Possible F2F meeting at DAC (week of June 13; Ernst will ask for interest on the mailing list). Telco meeting the week before if no F2F meeting at DAC.

7. AOB.

None.

8. Adjourn

Motion from David. Alain seconded. Ernst adjourned the meeting at 9:40am PDT.