IEEE P1076.1 Working Group Telco Meeting Minutes - August 14, 2013, 8am PDT (15:00 GMT)

Status: approved by WG on September 11, 2013

Attendees

• Ernst Christen, Mentor Graphics (WG chair)
• Vipin Ahuja, Avid Technology, Inc.
• Zhichao Deng, Synopsys, Inc.
• Enrique Reyes Archundia
• Joachim Haase, Fraunhofer (note taker)

This was a web meeting. The main discussion topics of the meeting are covered by the meeting slides. The minutes complement the meeting slides.

Agenda

• Call to order
• Approval of agenda
• Administrative issues
  • Minutes of June 26, 2013 meeting
  • Review of IEEE patent policy
• Project status and updates
  • LRM plan
  • PDE support- discussion about project scope
• Next meeting
• AOB
• Adjourn

Call to order

Ernst opened the meeting and welcomed the attendees at 8:05. Quorum was reached.

Approval of agenda

Zhichao made a motion to approve the agenda, seconded by Vipin. No objections. Agenda approved.

Administrative issues

Approval of June 26 minutes
Vipin moved that the minutes be accepted, Vipin seconded. No objections. Minutes were approved without chandes.

Patent policy
Ernst pointed to the IEEE patent policy and asked the attendees to visit the slides listed in the presentation to study it. Nobody wanted to see the slides.

Ernst informed that he updated the IEEE SA myProject site of the WG.

Project status and update

LRM plan
Ernst is in contact with Jim Lewis - Chair of the IEEE P1076 Study Group VHDL Analysis and Standardisation Group (VASG) - in order to synchronize the LRM activities of the IEEE P1076.1 WG and the VASG.

Partial Differential Equation Support
The discussion of the 2013-06-26 meeting on PDE Support and the scope of the WG project Support for Partial Differential Equations was continued. Ernst presented the 12th slide of the meeting slides on PDE as a starting point for the discussion. The slide results in the question: What is the P1076.1 niche?

Vipin will act as champion of the PDE activities. He indicates questions that should be clarified at the beginning of further activities (scope of the work, particular forms of PDEs that should be supported, delimitatition to specialized tools, area of application).

Ernst points out that PDE support should not be restricted to electrical phenomena. However, it should be restricted and directed towards a set of problems for system simulation. This leads to the task to identify classes of equations (parabolic, hyperbolic, elliptic) and methods to formulate problems (e.g. integral transform) that are important in this context. No dedicated PDE solver shall preferred. Application examples come for instance from 1D problems for MEMS, description of electromagnetic coupling in rotational machines, and heat flow problems.

Ernst mentioned that Verilog-AMS provides a ddx() operator to access to symbolically-computed partial derivatives of expressions in the analog block (see for instance section 4.5.6 of the Verilog-AMS LRM). This operator can be used for instance for compact modeling problems.

Zhichao mentions that problem size and special numerical problems must also be considered in the finding phase. Vipin says that the activities must be oriented with respect to users' interests. Another crucial point, iterated by Ernst, was that P1076.1 should include support for those PDE problems that would integrate with the simulation tool in a meaningful way.

The WG members are asked to send their input for PDE support problems that should be covered in VHDL-AMS to Vipin. Vipin will collect the inputs and prepare a strawman for the further discussion. Regarding the copyright issues of the IEEE, access to material of the discussion process will only be possible via the member-only area. A final white paper on the subject shall be published without access restrictions on the IEEE P1076.1 wiki site.

Other projects
There was no discussion on other projects.

Next steps

Next regular working group telco will be on September 11, 2013 at 8am PDT (15:00 UTC, 17:00 CEST).

AOB

Zhichao reminds his questions on Q'SLEW behavior with a discontinuous Q. The discussion shall be refreshed in one of the next meetings.

Adjourn

Ernst thanked the participants and adjourned the meeting at 9:06 am PDT.

-- JoachimHaase - 2013-09-04