ALF meeting April 16 1PM - 5PM @ Magma, Cupertino Attendees: Nancy Nettleton Sun Joe Daniels Accellera Tim Burks Magma Jay Liu Magma Greg Dufour Mentor Stephan Rochel Simplex (by phone) Alex Zamfirescu ASC Cynthia Parrish Aristo Sergei Sokolov Sequence Wolfgang Roethig NEC Review of last meeting minutes and AIs -------------------------------------- AI: find meeting opportunity @ DAC - Wolfgang TBD - Wolfgang to contact Paul for meeting opportunity on Friday June 20 AM AI: discuss all proposed meeting dates after DAC with OLA WG in April - Wolfgang DONE (see below) AI: find host for meeting during ASP-DAC (candidate: TI?), talk to Steve Schultz - Wolfgang NOT DONE - India as meeting location is maybe not realistic AI: send form to WG and Paul Menchini for sanity check and correctness - Wolfgang DONE - The PAR is ready for further revision and then submission for approval. AI: list Sequence ALF customers - Sergei DROPPED - not recommended to list industry users for PAR AI: contact Larry Rosenberg - Wolfgang TBD - Wolfgang to also contact other VSIA members AI: get contact info for Chris Lennard and others - Joe DONE AI: request Dennis Brophy to contact VSIA formally - Wolfgang, Greg TBD - Greg will contact Dennis Brophy concerning joint VSIA participation. AI: publicity for CICC tutorial and panel - all Steffen will make some publicity. AI: find possible attendees for ALF meeting during CICC - all Possible attendees: Tim Ehrler, Steffen Rochel (before May 9), Joe Daniels, Wolfgang Roethig AI: find out what IEC is - Joe DONE - see Joe's email AI: get Magma person for official ALF strategy statement - Frank Rajit Chandra will determine Magma's position concerning their ALF participation. AI: find out whether Accellera would be interested in creating a legal distribution channel for Open Source code - Frank Wolfgang will talk to Dennis PAR Process ----------- 1. Reviewed the updated PAR with Paul Menchini's suggested changes. 2. The group discussed whether to further refine the descriptions for the Scope and Purpose of the PAR (and Title). 2a. Change the Scope (statement) ",ranging between RTL and tape-out," 2b. Change the Title "A standard for an Advanced Library Format (ALF) describing Integrated Circuit (IC) technology, cells, and blocks" 2c. Simplify the Name "ALF work group" 3. The group discussed which (existing) standards or current efforts (projects) are similar to ALF in scope. 3a. Edit the Similarity section (#12) "There are standards and projects covering parts of the scope, but none of those encompass the entire scope." 3b. Revise the listing of similar projects 1481 covers ... OLA covers ... ALF covers ... --> use Wolfgang's edits for changes to #12 "IEEE 1481-1999 Std contains a clause for Procedural Interface (PI) and another clause for Delay Calculation Language (DCL). The PI defined by IEEE 1481-1999 Std may be extended by OLA (Open Library Architecture) in the future. ALF is a standard for modeling, whereas IEEE 1481-1999 Std and OLA are standards for data access. There are standards and projects covering parts of the scope, but none of them encompassing the entire scope. Certain projects, owned by EDA vendors, are positioned and used as de-facto standards. However, their usage is not royalty-free, and versions are controlled by the vendors. Therefore, they are difficult to support, combine and enhance by parties others than the originating vendors. Furthermore, such projects do not supply languages with well-defined semantics. The semantics are given as reference implementations of particular EDA tools and are subject to change. ALF is the only proposed standard covering the entire scope of EDA applications as defined in 9. with clearly defined, unified semantics." 4. Revise #16 per Wolfgang's edits. "Pertinent ideas to the ALF specification have already been successfully used in the industry. Hence, there is a desire for standardization. In particular, ALF builds on existing industry standards, such as Verilog and VHDL. Compatibility between ALF library definitions and Verilog / VHDL design definitions will be ensured." 5. Fulfill the requirement of standards policy revision AI: review http://standards.ieee.org by next meeting - all IEEE ALF Outline ---------------- 1. Revise Introduction section: Background, Compliance, Organization, Acknowledgements. 2. Add ALF-OLA cross-reference. 3. Expand definitions for older material so each definition includes the syntax, semantics, example snippets, and relationship(s) (cross-references) to other elements. 4. Move Old Ch 11 (Snytax) into a comprehensive, singular (BNF) Annex. Meeting Schedule ---------------- 1. Who's going to CICC? - Joe, tim, Steffen, Wolfgang 2. June 20th in the morning (DAC) 3. The rest of the schedule discussed with OLA WG on Tue Apr 17 OLA meetings: Jul 25-26 IBM Fishkill NY Sep 18-20 Mentor Graphics Wilsonville OR (w ALF) Nov 13-15 Synopsys Mountain View CA (w ALF) Jan 02 15-17 Philips Phoenix AR (w ALF) OLA conf call weekly Thu 11AM 4. Start TCs on Tue @ 10 am (starting May 1st) 5. Motion to invite various companies to participate in the ALFSG. "The ALF study group requests your participation in the development of the ALF IEEE standard. Please let us know whether a) you are interested to participate and you have a person who will attend the meetings b) you are interested but have not identified a person c) you are undecided at this time d) you are not interested at this time" To be sent to EDA vendors, Silicon vendors, Library vendors, other standardization orgs, academia Technical discussion -------------------- The proposals in the work doc were reviewed for their technical merit. Proposals for new ALF features could be "retained", i.e., the stay in the work doc for further discussion or "rejected", i.e. the are remoived from the work doc. Anybody can at any time put new proposals into the work doc. Item 1: Define support levels for the vector expression language 1yes, 3no, 3abstain -> reject Item 2: Metal density rules 5yes, 1abstain -> retain Item 3: Current through branches 5yes, 1abstain AI: amend proposal - Alex Item 4 and 5: not reviewed AI: review item 4 and 5 - all Summary of AIs -------------- 1. Review IEEE IP policies before next meeting (all). 2. Get the OLAWG to contribute to a (common) ALF-OLA cross-reference (Joe). 3. Track any common ALF-OLA issues to determine further ALF issues (Wolfgang). 4. Review existing ALF 2.0 Spec Sections 3 and 4 (Alex). 5. Submit (late) invited paper to FDL (Wolfgang). 6. Formally invite to join the meetings (Wolfgang). 7. Add names to the above list (Sergei). 8. Add more 'university' names to list (Alex, Wolfgang, Sergei). 9. Set up conference call on Tue May 1st @ 10 am (Wolfgang). 10. Review proposals in work doc (all).