IEEE P1076.1 Working Group Telco Meeting Minutes - October 9, 2013, 8am PDT (15:00 UTC)

Status: approved December 11, 2013

Attendees

• Ernst Christen, Mentor Graphics (WG chair)
• Vipin Ahuja, Avid Technology
• Zhichao Deng, Synopsys
• Daniel Kho, Altera
• Alain Vachoux, EPFL
• 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 September 11, 2013 meeting
  • Review of IEEE patent policy
  • Officer elections
• Project status and updates
  • LRM plan
  • PDE support - typical applications
• Next meeting
• AOB
• Adjourn

Call to order

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

Approval of agenda

Joachim made a motion to approve the agenda, seconded by Alain. No objections. Agenda was approved.

Administrative issues

Approval of September 11, 2013 minutes
Alain moved that the minutes be accepted, Zhichao seconded. No objections. Minutes were approved after correction of a typo.

Patent policy
Ernst showed the IEEE patent policy slides and explained the policy. He requested to ask questions about the patent policy immediately or to send later to him.

Officer elections
The term of Chair, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer of the working group is over at the end of the year. The nomination period of the necessary elections will start on November 1, 2013. It is expected to complete the elections in early December. Ernst appointed Joachim as Returning Officer. Details on the election procedure are figured out in the Policies and Procedures for the IEEE P1076.1 Working Group.

Project status and update

LRM plan
Alain created the baseline version of the LRM clauses 1 to 7. Material is available in the LRM editing area. He generated PDFs of the corresponding parts of the 1076.1-2007 and 1076-2008 Standards using the baseline Framemaker document, compared these PDFs with the official Std documents and fixed inconsistencies in clauses 1 to 6. Alain will continue with clauses 7 to 11.

Partial Differential Equation Support
Vipin is working on a document that will summarize different aspects of requirements for PDE support within VHDL-AMS. A crucial point is how useful is PDE support in VHDL-AMS. The question comes up because it seems that PDE standardization efforts for Modelica have not been very successful so far. A solution could be to handle the support similiar to Verilog-AMS where only a ddx() operator is provided. Ernst pointed out that this operator especially provides derivatives to quantities that can be used for small signal analysis.

The subsequent discussion touched several topics from e-mails distributed by Vipin and Zhichao before the teleconf as elaboration of ddx() in Verilog-AMS, problems with basic building blocks for PDE support, lists of arguments of such blocks, and use of nested functions for higher order derivatives. Ernst recalled that constraints must be checked considering the usage of static expressions and attributes. Vipin will distribute a plain text document that takes into account the current status of the discussion.

Finally, Zhichao pointed to a Modelica paper (L. Saldamli, B. Bachmann, P. Fritzson, H. Wiesmann, "A Framework for Describing and Solving PDE Models in Modelica", Proc. 4th Modelica Conference, 2005, pp. 113-122) that figures out an interesting approach for PDE support. He also pointed to the problem of handling discontinuities in the context of PDE support. Ernst suggested that such analysis should be done. Conceptual problems and the theory behind have to be considered.

Other projects
Zhichao informed that most of the work to support vector matrix operations has been done. A proposal can be prepared for the review by the working group. David Bishop put a version of the Matrix math package for type REAL to the VHDL-2008 Support library reflector.

Next steps

Next regular working group telco will be on November 13, 2013 at 8am PST (16:00 UTC, 17:00 CET).

AOB

No other business.

Adjourn

Ernst thanked the participants and adjourned the meeting at 9:00 am PDT.

-- JoachimHaase - 2013-10-13