Attendees:
Mark Hahn, Cadence (Chair)
Jin-sheng Shyr, Toshiba (Co-chair)
Tom Dewey, Mentor
Ibnar Faruque, Synopsys
Steve Grouts, Sematech
Enrico Malavasi, Cadence
Dan Moritz, LSI Logic
Greg Schulte, Ambit
Jim Swift, IBM
Andres Teene, Symbios
Next Meeting:
The next meeting will be a teleconference on Tuesday, 8/4/98,
from 9-11 am PDT.
New action items:
Who When What
---------- ------ --------
1. Greg 7/23 Remove "Ambit Confidential" from the Ambit
constraint document
2. Enrico 8/4 Write up a description of the "happiness"
function for relating constraint priorities
3. Steve 8/4 Send email on tie timing nomenclature
Open action items:
Who When What
---------- ------ --------
1. Steve 6/22 First draft of taxonomy for parasitics
-> 7/21 boundary conditions
-> 7/22
2. Jin 6/22 First draft of taxonomy for timing boundary
-> 7/21 conditions
3. Greg 6/22 Write up an extended description of how tags work
-> 8/4
4. Jim 6/22 Write up an extended description of how operating
-> 7/21 conditions work
-> 8/4
Completed action items:
Who When What
---------- ------ --------
1. Mark 7/21 Get Enrico to send Powerpoint version of his
conceptual model presentation
2. Mark 7/21 Get Enrico to contribute to expanding the
transformation model in Jin's presentation
3. Steve 7/21 Send memos from CHDStd on hierarchy tracking
mechanisms
4. Greg 6/22 First draft of taxonomy for exceptions
-> 7/21
5. Mark 7/7 Arrange for a face to face meeting at ICCAD
-> 7/21
6. Mark 7/7 Look into face to face meeting coinciding with
-> 7/21 ISLPED (International Symposium on Low Power
Electronics and Design)
7. Mark 7/7 Follow up with Vassilios on legal aspects of
-> 7/21 Ambit donation
Details:
1. Discuss review meeting for the Ambit donation
We agreed that the review meeting would be held as proposed on
Tuesday 7/28. Steve Grouts was concerned about the Ambit Confidential
footnote on the Ambit document, which Greg Schulte agreed to remove.
We discussed what selecting it as a strawman would mean:
- The choice is not whether it should be the DC-WG standard,
but whether it would be useful as a strawman in creating
the DC-WG standard. If the strawman was accepted, DC-WG
could modify it, add to it, or come up with an alternative
in creating the standard.
We discussed the relationship between the Ambit strawman, the
DC-WG standard and GCF. GCF is a Cadence-proprietary format which
has been provided to DC-WG for review purposes, but it is not being
proposed as a strawman. GCF is intended to be used as a tool-to-tool
interchange format which is easy for tools to support, rather than
a user entry language. In previous discussions about whether an
interchange format should be included in the DC-WG charter, we opted
not to include it. This was based on the argument that the user
entry language could be used as an interchange format by restricting
the use of macros, regular expressions, and other language features
which are a lot of work for tools to support.
We discussed transistor-level constraints briefly in the context
of how suitable the Ambit language is for this. Mark pointed out
that there are issues with relying on pins as the design object to
associate constraints with, because in a transistor-level design
there may not be a single pin which is appropriate. Steve argued
that there is usually a hierarchy level around the group of transistors
which form a gate, and pins exist on that module.
2. Review progress on action items
We reviewed Greg's summary of the path exceptions.
- An instance name should be allowed for from/through/to options.
- Macros like find(), all_inputs() are needed, but this should
be addressed in a separate discussion.
- Constraints for minimum and maximum combinational delay should
be added, including offsets on the from and to pins.
We talked about whether path groups should be part of the standard.
We agreed that some general mechanism for specifying the relative
priority of different constraints is required, but that path groups
are just a special case of this.
Thanks,
Mark
-- Mark Hahn phone: (408) 428-5399 Architect, Deep Submicron Business Unit fax: (408) 428-5959 Cadence Design Systems email: mhahn@cadence.com