Attendees:
Mark Hahn, Cadence (Chair)
Jin-sheng Shyr, Toshiba (Co-chair)
Tom Dewey, Mentor
Steve Grouts, Sematech
Dan Moritz, LSI Logic
Greg Schulte, Ambit
Summary:
- This was a special teleconference dedicated to reviewing
the Ambit constraint language donation.
- The group voted unanimously to accept the donation as a
strawman.
- The group thought that the donation covered most basic timing
constraints, but some things are missing. The donation primarily
focuses on ASIC design methodologies, and needs to be expanded by
DC-WG for more general use.
Details:
1. What do we mean by a strawman?
We discussed again what accepting the language as a strawman
would mean. DC-WG can modify it, use part of it, add to it,
or come up with an alternative in creating the DC-WG standard.
2. How do we avoid backward compatibility problems?
We agreed that it is appropriate to define some mechanism to
make the commands in the DC-WG standard distinct from the Ambit
commands. This is consistent with the philosophy of avoiding
naming conflicts between the DC-WG constraint commands and the
native commands in tools in general. The exact mechanism will need
to be defined, but two possibilities are to add a prefix to each
command or use TCL namespaces.
3. How do we track changes to the Ambit language?
The donation is a static snapshot. For subsequent changes Ambit
makes to their tools, they can discuss the changes in the DC-WG
meetings and we can decide whether to make corresponding changes
to the DC-WG standard.
Thanks,
Mark
-- Mark Hahn phone: (408) 428-5399 Architect, Deep Submicron Business Unit fax: (408) 428-5959 Cadence Design Systems email: mhahn@cadence.com