1076.1 (VHDL-AMS) Working Group activities

Dear members of the IEEE 1076.1 Working Group,

Since IEEE Std. 1076.1-1999 was approved in 1999, there has been
little activity in the working group other than addressing questions
of interpretation or errors in the language definition. During this
period, the commercial vendors were given the time to develop or
enhance their tools to support this standard. At the recent Forum on
Design and Specification Languages FDL'04 in Lille, Georg Pelz from
Infineon stated that "There are now 5 VHDL-AMS simulators available,
so we have a modeling problem, no longer a tool problem [for this
language to be adopted widely]." While this is true, we understand
that none of these simulators supports the complete language as
specified in IEEE STD. 1076.1-1999.

On the administrative side, the WG Executive Committee has started to
work on three activities that will involve the Working Group over the
next few months. First, we need to renew the roster of the 1076.1
Working Group to reflect the fact that many addresses may have become
stale. Second, the officers of the WG must be elected. Finally, the
reballoting of IEEE Std. 1076.1-1999 must be initiated with the
adoption of a renewal PAR (as a reminder, IEEE standards must be
reballoted after 5 years).

To express your continued interest in the activities of the 1076.1
Working Group, please send the following information ASAP to Alain
Vachoux, the WG secretary, at alain.vachoux@epfl.ch:

  Name, address, email address, IEEE membership number and business
  affiliations. Additionally, society or organizational Designated
  Representatives (DR) and alternates (DRA) should list as DR or DRA
  and the IEEE Society or organization (as applicable), together with
  organization address.

To participate in the election and the vote, the new DASC (Design
Automation Standards Committee) bylaws require that you be a DASC
member. We encourage you to join this organization to be able to
participate actively in Working Group matters. Application for DASC
membership may be found at http://dasc.org/ (follow the "Application
form" on the left side of the page). You can join DASC at any time,
but to conduct business before the end of the year you must have
registered by December 10.

After December 10, we will hold elections and the vote on a renewal
PAR. This should be completed by the end of the year, so the newly
elected WG Executive Committee can take charge in January 2005.
Once the renewal PAR gets approved, activities on updating the 1076.1
standard will start as well, according to the following plan:

Scope: Synchronization of the Analog and Mixed Signal Extensions to
        VHDL with enhancements to the base language defined by IEEE
        Std. 1076. Currently, IEEE Std. 1076.1-1999 is based on IEEE
        Std. 1076-1993, which has been revised since then.
        Fixing errors in LRM
Schedule: Technical and editorial work during the first half of 2005
        Reballoting of the revised standard during the second half of
        2005
Funding: TBD

In summary, you will see renewed activity on the 1076.1 reflector in
months to come. Again, we encourage you to participate actively in the
WG business. To do so, please renew your WG membership and enroll as
a DASC member.

The 1076.1 Executive Committee
Tom Kazmierski, chair
Ernst Christen, vice-chair
Alain Vachoux, secretary
Received on Tue Nov 30 09:35:41 2004