SV-XC Participation

At the sv-xc meeting last week I took an action item to send email 
about a couple of issues that we discussed, in hopes that it would
start an email discussion and/or improve attendance at the meeting
next week. 

Here is the first one:

Is there enough commitment to this interoperability standard 
to make it a reality? If so, how can we make better progress?

The sv-xc committee has been operating for over a year now, and after
a promising start, we no longer seem to be making much progress.
We have seen a significant decline in participation over the past 
few months. The development of technical material has been slower 
than originally planned, resulting in canceled meetings due to a 
lack of material to discuss. More recently, we have had difficulty 
reaching quorum, even when there is material to discuss.

There seems to be agreement that an interoperability standard 
has value, and the group has been working in harmony. Our slowing
progress appears to be due to a combination of issues:

    1) Most participants prefer to be observers and reviewers, 
       rather than proposal contributors. The lack of urgency
       may be partly due to the fact that mixed-language products 
       have been around for a long time, and have evolved to be
       fairly similar to one another. The lack of a documented
       standard is not preventing users from working in mixed-language 
       domains or tool providers from enhancing existing solutions.

    2) The size and complexity of our task has made it unrealistic
       to include our work in the next revision of the SystemVerilog 
       standard, so we have no standardization schedule pressure
       to drive our progress.

    3) Without a steady stream of technical material to discuss
       or a pressing schedule, it is easier to let another commitment 
       take priority over a given biweekly meeting, and thus attendance 
       at our biweekly meetings has become irregular. The need 
       to defer and/or repeat discussions is taking its toll on
       meeting productivity.

It will take several years to develop an interoperability standard
at our current rate. I think that there was agreement at the last
meeting that we should re-evaluate both our resource commitments
and our mode of operation as we consider the feasibility of this
interoperability standardization effort.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.