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

All,

Steve makes a good point on the issue of money. I think it would be good not to forget how VHDL came to life. It was US government funding (which we are unlikely to see again since today's funding is focused on "nano-technology.") combined with corporate drive to create, establish and foster the creation of the language.

There was no IEEE for VHDL. There was no DASC for VHDL.

It was only after VHDL was solid did it move to the IEEE for its ratification there. And, the VHDL group really invented for the IEEE the DASC.

I also think the other key element of success for a standard is market relevance. All the participating companies working on VHDL knew a priori their investment - to make tools - to consume tools - would have a market and value.

There may well be a place for standards groups to advance only the state-of-the-art, to focus only on the elements of technology, but this is probably better left to research institutes, universities and not to standards groups. Standards groups strike a balance between the elements of technology and the needs of the market.

At a World Standards Day celebration not too many years ago in Washington D.C., the Under Secretary for Technology in the Dept. of Commerce spoke to this issue well. His point was the market needed to regulate itself and that it was better for market participants to be the ones creating, funding and sponsoring standards. He called on industry to accept this challenge. The IEEE has taken this challenge to heart and amended their process to offer entity sponsorship. (Since the IEEE is domiciled in the US, this fact influences it quite a bit to make the Under Secretary's comments very pertinent.)

Entity sponsorship was not an option when VHDL first came to the IEEE. This is an option today and has value to bind market needs and demands with market participants in the standards making process. The last thing any of us want is another VHDL-93 (really VHDL-92 as we all know) that took almost a decade to garner wide support and adoption. We don't need to let this opportunity slip through our fingers. We need to seize it.

-Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vhdl-200x@eda.org [mailto:owner-vhdl-200x@eda.org] On Behalf Of Bailey, Stephen
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 6:40 AM
To: vhdl-200x@eda.org
Subject: 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 21:39:48 2004