IEEE P1076.1 Working Group Telco Meeting Minutes - April 13, 2011 8am PDT (17:00 CET)

Status: approved on June 15, 2011.

Attendees

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

Agenda

• Call to order
• Approval of agenda
• Administrative issues
• Project overview and status
• Next meeting
• AOB
• Adjourn

Call to order on April 13, 2011 at 8am PDT

Ernst welcomed the participants and started presenting the meeting slides.

Approval of the agenda

Motion from Alain, David seconded. No objections and abstentions. Agenda approved.

Administrative issues

Minutes of December 7 working group meeting
Motion from Joachim, David seconded. No objections and abstentions. Minutes approved.

Minutes of January 11 working group meeting
Motion from Joachim, David and Alain. No objections and abstentions. Minutes approved.

Minutes of February 8 working group meeting
Motion from Alain, Joachim seconded. No objections and abstentions. Minutes approved.

Fundraising
Ernst to convene a meeting with the WG officers to discuss how to proceed.

Coordination with P1076
Mutual work between P1076 and P1076.1 currently concerns Vector/Matrix Operations and Table-Driven Modeling works. P1076 has recently moved to a new Twiki site. Harmonization may require to define new Twiki rules for allowing members access to private pages and in general to better track working group membership.

1076.1.1 revision
IEEE publication date not yet known.

1076.1 revision
NesCom vote breakdown was 2/3 of members approved and 1/3 did not react on time. David raised the issue of having email addresses in clear in the pdf of the PAR that is now published on the Twiki site. Ernst will try to mask them in the document.

Project overview and status

VHPI-AMS
No progress due to lack of time (David). Further work to be reported at the next WG meeting. No subcommittee meeting planned.

1076.1.1 integration
Ernst mentioned two main tasks: 1) including the 1076.1.1 definitions in the new 1076.1 LRM and 2) extending the current definitions to the support of dimensions. David added that the review of 1076.1.1 against the IEEE SI 10 standard has the objective to check the compatibility of used terms and expressions, e.g., the way to write numbers in a computer readable format.

Other mandatory changes
Peter Ashenden's plan is to work 15-16hrs on the upgrade of 1076.1-2007 LRM integrating the 1076-2008 LRM and the 1076.1.1-2010 LRM. The WG has currently money for about 10hrs of work. Additional fundraising will be discussed in an upcoming WG officer meeting.

Table-driven modeling
Ernst mentioned that the test of the existing draft package requires a new VHDL 2008 feature, i.e. the support of unconstrained records (or records having unconstrained array fields). Since this capability may not be yet supported by all VHDL tools, a possible workaround would be to temporarily constrain the array sizes to sufficiently large values at the price of a loss of storage efficiency.
Joachim to update the material on the private TDM subcommittee Twiki page.

Vector/matrix operations
Test of draft packages has been discussed. Ernst recalled that the P1076 WG used the comp.lang.vhdl discussion group (previously a Usenet and today a Google open discussion group) to validate the fixed-point packages. He also mentioned that these packages has been developed by David Bishop as a result of his work at Kodak. Then Kodak donated the packages to the P1076 WG for inclusion in the 1076-2008 standard. Ernst raised the possibility to do the same with VMO and other packages, especially since David Bishop is also the author of the draft VMO packages. David Smith raised in turn the problem of ownership of work and copyright issues. Ernst replied that this is on the table and that it will be eventually resolved.

Next steps and meeting

The next deadline for publishing in Simulation News in Europe is August 2011.

Telco, May 11, 2011, 8am PDT (15:00 UTC).

AOB

None.

Adjourn

Ernst adjourned the meeting at 9am PDT.