Attendees:

0000000000000001000010111100000000000000000 Qamar Alam
1111111111111111111010111111101111110111111 Himyanshu Anand
0111111110011111101110100011111111111110111 Kenneth Bakalar
1111101010110110111011000011100011101010000 Prabal Bhattacharya
0000000000000011000010100100001001000000100 Sri Chandra
0111101111111111110110101111101111100011111 Eduard Cerny
1110111000010110101110111110111111101010000 Scott Cranston
0000000000000001000000000000000100000010000 Dave Cronauer
0000000000001100000000011111100111101110010 Dejan Nickovic
1101110111100100000000000000000000000000000 Mike Demler
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Surrendra Dudani
1110000000111111111111001101111111111111111 John Havlicek
1110001100100000000000000000000000000000000 Kevin Jones
0000000111111111101110111111111111111111111 Jim Lear
0000000000001110111000000000000000000011101 Top Lertpanyavit
1111110110111111111111111011111111111111111 Scott Little
0000000000000100000000000000000000000000000 Erik Seligman
1010000000000000000000000000000000000000000 David Sharrit
0000000100000000000000000000000000000000000 Murtaza
0000000100000000000101100110000001001000000 Martin O'Leary

SUMMARY:

-Ken Bakalar gave a report on the P1800 working group meeting. A straw poll was taken at the end of the meeting. AMS features were rated highly by the vendors, but the users did not rate them as highly. Ken conjectured that AMS will likely be in the PAR. It was suggested that we more closely follow the activities of the P1800 working group. Scott Little will find out about the meetings and attend as an observer. P1800 is considering doing a 2 year cycle focusing on clean-up. Final decisions have not been made.

-The committee will meet less frequently. The subcommittees on assertions and embedding the assertions will meet separately. Ken Bakalar will chair the embedding assertions subcommittee and John Havlicek will chair the assertions subcommittee.

-The main committee will meet again on 2010.04.07 when Ken Bakalar will present a technical working document about embedding the assertions. It is expected that the assertions subcommittee will also have a technical working document around the same time.

-Information regarding the subcommittee meetings and discussion should be conducted using the mailing list.

ACTION ITEMS:

-Scott Little will start attending P1800 working group meetings as an observer.

-Ken Bakalar and the embedding subcommittee (which includes only Ken right now...volunteers are welcome.) will begin meetings and present a technical working document to the full ASVA committee on 2010.04.07.

-John Havlicek will organize the assertions subcommittee and begin meetings with the aim to produce a technical working document to the full ASVA committee soon after 2010.04.07.

DETAILS:

SL: How did the P1800 meeting go?

KB: I said our piece and there wasn't much reaction. There wasn't any jeering or cheering. In the end a straw poll was taken and analog suprisingly came out near the top. The interest was surprisingly from producers instead of consumers.

JL: Interesting.

KB: It is a skewed sample b/c the large group are SoC folks.

TL: It was mostly producers that attended.

KB: It is hard to get consumers involved. The producer would like it, but getting consumers time is hard. We were not rejected. I think we will find a place in the PAR once it is written. Whether any action will be taken is largely up to us. It also depends on which committe we interface with. I think that our job here at least at the first level is that the discussion goes on in the open. Even if we converge under the Accellera banner talking openly and converging is important.

JL: Can you give a summary of the P1800 discussions?

KB: There is a strong feeling that the 1800 standard needs a lot of repair work. That was the dominant theme. There are things that are unclear or never implemented. Some areas like macro expansion need a complete rework. Cadence and Mentor would like to see the primary effort be rework. The target attracted the most attention was an extension for aspect oriented programming. Multiple inheritance and aspect oriented programming were both high on the list. Changes to the way x's are propagated was proposed by Sunburst. No decision was made, but the sense of the meeting was that we need to fix what is broken and use a 2 year timescale for a revision. Only introduce a minimal set of high priority fixes. No action was taken and I don't know how the decision will actually be made. There was a lot of discussion about what will actually go in the PAR.

JL: What is the timeline on submitting the PAR? Have we formally requested for this mixed-signal assertion in the PAR?

KB: There is no formal submission mechanism, but we are high on the list and have been recognized.

EC: My understanding is that the PAR will be general and the details will be provided by the subcommittees.

JL: Why a PAR in that case?

KB: To provide boundaries for the standards work. It is to prevent the work from wandering off into inappropriate directions. The P1800 working group will begin meeting soon to discuss the PAR.

JL: Should we get involved in this?

KB: It might be a good idea for us to attend. JH do you attend?

JH: No.

SL: What should we do?

JH: One could show up as an observer and try to render the necessary opinions. I think this would be something we could do.

JL: Scott, will you do this?

SL: Okay.

TL: I work with Matt Maidment and I could talk to him and have him let me know if the discussions go in a specific direction.

SL: That would be great.

KB: One thing that is important is to provide technically reasoned document of what we want to do.

SL: Let's move to that discussion item. Last time we discussed the 3 buckets and there was some concern that synchronization may not stand on its own very well.

JL: I have an interest in the assertions and synchronization.

KB: They are tied to together.

JL: I have sent out some e-mail regarding how this might look.

SL: I believe that we should move to less frequent meetings while the subcommittee work proceeds.

JL: How are those documents formed? Can we switch the meeting time? Should we just take this in sequence?

KB: My impulse is to say that when a proposal is sufficiently mature then this is the right forum. We don't need more levels of organization.

EC: I think the sequential approach would be good.

JL: Let's start talking about binding and plumbing next week as that is the least controversial.

JH: I don't think that the plumbing is the least controversial. I would like to see others work on the plumbing while I work on assertions structure.

HA: What are the dependencies out here?

JL: I would opt to put synchronization last.

SL: We need written technical proposals to move forward.

JL: What is the schedule for a proposal?

JH: I think it will take about 6 months to get to a proposal. Things that still need to be studied are how local variables will work, how timed LTL operators fit in which I don't think will be difficult. Also, some discussion of the complexity. There are concerns that some constructs may not be well suited to

JL: Does that mean we won't be ready to discuss for some time?

JH: No.

SL: John mentioned several pieces of work. I think that the subcommittee can bring these pieces to the main group at the frequency of a month or so.

JH: My thought is that we would break out and the folks working on the subproblems would meet with greater frequency. We would come back together at a lower frequency as the larger group.

SL: Ken, since you are the only one on the embedding subcommittee I would presume you will chair the committee. John, will you chair the assertions commitee?

JH: Yes.

SL: We should determine which subcommittee will produce first. Is someone willing to volunteer to provide the technical working document for the next meeting?

KB: I will have a document.

SL: When?

KB: 1 month.

JL: I think that the subcommittees should try to use this time slot for their meetings.

SL: Subcommittees should communicate via the mailing so all can see.

-- ScottLittle - 2010-03-03