RE: FW: [vhdl-200x] 1076 & Entity balloting

Evan,

What's the point of arguing for something that is different but neither better nor worse than an alternative? We need to choose a type of membership for the WG. Whether you wish to explicitly say so or deny, what was implicit in the discussion you initiated in pointing to an anonymous source's posting on Accellera and FVTC history is that organizational entity membership is bad (undesired). That is a qualitative judgment meant to influence others in the WG.

Accellera is not a true standards organization. They are a standards catalyst organization which does follow from their role as a promoter of EDA standards. If Accellera were a true standards organization, they would have no need to donate their work to the IEEE.

What has put Accellera into the position of being able to strongly influence standards evolution and development? Something the DASC has never had: Money.

Organizational entity membership is an attempt to better position P1076 (and other DASC WGs) to remedy this situation.

-Steve Bailey

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Evan Lavelle [mailto:anti.spam1@dsl.pipex.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 3:50 AM
> To: Bailey, Stephen
> Cc: vhdl-200x@eda.org
> Subject: Re: FW: [vhdl-200x] 1076 & Entity balloting
>
> Before getting swamped in the details, it's important not to
> lose sight of the big picture. The FVTC took 4 years of
> technical activity to create the assertion language that
> Accellera wanted, before Accellera decided, for what appear
> to be political reasons, that the donation of one of its
> sponsors (which had already essentially been rejected by the
> FVTC) was more important than the work of its own technical committee.
>
> I'm not now, and I have never, said that this is either a
> good or a bad thing. It's simply how vendor-driven standards
> are created. My point is that we, in the IEEE, should not be
> going down this road. If it's possible to carry on using a
> process in which individuals have a technical input and a
> vote, then that's what we should be doing. If, on the other
> hand, we end up in a situation where those individuals donate
> their time and expertise and end up without a vote, then they
> will very quickly come to the conclusion that they are being
> used, and that they are wasting their time.
>
> Bailey, Stephen wrote:
>
> > There were many people that thought that a single
> assertion/property
> > language would be best and sufficient. The alignment
> process that the
> > Accellera Board "dictated" was directed to get SVA and PSL
> closer to
> > the ideal of a single language. For various reasons (some
> technical
> > and some related to syntactic sugaring), one language was not the
> > result.
>
> I diasgree with the reasons you give: I think the primary
> reason was simply political. Why didn't the sv-ac just go
> with PSL? Why did they instead vote to accept the OVA
> donation, when the FVTC had clearly done much more work than
> the sv-ac, and when the FVTC had already rejected ForSpec?
>
> > So, if organization entity membership is the evil that this
> example was meant to demonstrate, why:
>
> I'm not saying it's evil; I'm saying it's different.
>
> > 1. Isn't PSL simply SVA? (Or vice versa)
>
> In fact, PSL1.1 and SVA are nearly the same. Complete
> alignment wasn't possible because PSL and SVA have two
> different goals: PSL is stand-alone, SVA is embedded within
> SystemVerilog. The final report of the alignment committee
> states that 'It is our opinion that, as of January 2004, we
> have achieved as much alignment as is possible given the
> differing objectives of the two languages'.
>
> > 2. Why did the Accellera board approve PSL 1.01 and 1.1?
>
> If memory serves me correctly, they delayed approval of 1.01
> as long as possible, until it was clear that it was already
> obsolete because it no longer had the support of the board,
> and because it was to be replaced by 1.1.
>
> > 3. Why didn't the Accellera board dissolve the FVTC or
> instruct the
> > SV working group to narrow its scope to not include assertions?
>
> They couldn't dump the FVTC after 4 years of work because
> they would never have lived it down. Instead, they just told
> it what conclusions were necessary.
>
> > 4. Why has Accellera donated both SV and PSL to the IEEE?
> It could
> > have easily squashed one or both.
>
> SVA is embedded, PSL is stand-alone so, at the end of the
> day, they couldn't dump one. On the other hand, PSL has a
> SystemVerilog flavour, so perhaps they could have dumped one.
>
> > If there's any lessons to be learned by the Accellera/FVTC
> experience
> > it is that all organizations with a vested interest need to
> > participate and have their voices heard. If 4 companies
> failed in one
> > domain and succeeded in the other, their success was only possible
> > because the organizations responsible for their failure in
> the one did
> > not participate in the other.
>
> I would suggest that any company which participated in the
> FVTC would have had a reasonable expectation that the outcome
> of the FVTC's deliberations would be the 'standard' Accellera
> assertion language. Why would these companies have had an
> interest in also participating in the SystemVerilog effort?
> Surely they would have expected their work to appear in
> SystemVerilog anyway? Do you think the goalposts might have
> been moved, following the OVA donation?
>
> > If you think individual membership eliminates this problem, you are
> > very naïve. As I have said before, it is currently easier for an
> > organization to dominate the outcome of a WG by purchasing the $40
> > membership of enough of their employees. And, individual
> membership
> > makes it easier to camouflage what is happening as the
> assumption is
> > that individuals are making their own decisions and not
> just carrying
> > water for their company.
>
> To solve the problem you need transparency and a well-defined
> agenda. As it happens, I don't think that the current system
> is the best way to achieve this. However, I do think that a
> move to entity voting, with individual technical input, is
> not an advance. I've also brought up the issue of entities
> flooding the DASC with their own employees, but there was
> little interest in this on the DASC list.
>
> > Worse, individual membership can result in individuals
> having agendas
> > with no market relevance or negative market relevance.
> Well meaning
> > engineers can be notoriously stubborn in holding out for the holy
> > grail of technical solutions no matter the cost.
>
> Agreed. And, even worse, individuals with a weak technical
> background can make the process meaningless.
>
> > In conclusion, your example does not prove that
> organizational entity
> > membership is inherently inferior to individual membership.
>
> I agree entirely; but my point was that they're *different*,
> and are driven by different agendas, not that one is better
> or worse. This is a point I've made several times in the
> other thread (on the DASC list?).
> The vendors already have their own standards organisation;
> let's not let them muscle in on ours. The membership issues
> have to be fixed, but we can't do this simply by moving to
> entity participation.
>
> In fact,
> > the results from Accellera prove that organizational entity
> membership
> > can result in coordination of standards and different
> standards that
> > overlap in scope. It also shows that while a single entity
> (or even 4
> > like-minded entities) can influence, they cannot dictate
> the outcome.
>
> I have to disagree with that. The whole history of PSL, SVA,
> and SystemVerilog shows, if nothing else, that individual
> vendors can completely control the outcome of a
> standardisation process.
>
> Evan Lavelle
>
Received on Thu Jun 24 06:40:25 2004