[ibis-macro] Minutes from the 29 Apr 2014 ibis-atm meeting
- From: Mike LaBonte <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ibis-macro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 18:07:45 -0400
Minutes from the 29 Apr 2014 ibis-atm meeting are attached.
Mike
IBIS Macromodel Task Group
Meeting date: 29 April 2014
Members (asterisk for those attending):
Agilent: * Fangyi Rao
* Radek Biernacki
Altera: * David Banas
ANSYS: * Dan Dvorscak
* Curtis Clark
Cadence Design Systems: * Ambrish Varma
Brad Brim
* Kumar Keshavan
* Ken Willis
Scott Huss
Ericsson: Anders Ekholm
Intel: * Michael Mirmak
LSI Amaresh Malipatil
Dai Xingdong
Maxim Integrated Products: Hassan Rafat
Mentor Graphics: * John Angulo
* Arpad Muranyi
Andrey Matvienko
Vladimir Dmitriev-Zdorov
Micron Technology: * Randy Wolff
Justin Butterfield
QLogic Corp. James Zhou
Andy Joy
SiSoft: * Walter Katz
* Todd Westerhoff
* Mike LaBonte
Teraspeed Consulting Group: Scott McMorrow
* Bob Ross
The meeting was led by Arpad Muranyi
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Opens:
- Ambrish: I had requested time to present today.
- Walter: I sent example models to everyone, would like to ask questions about
that.
- Walter: The redriver flow BIRD should be on our agenda in a future meeting.
--------------------------
Call for patent disclosure:
- None
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Review of ARs:
- Walter send backchannel example files, Mike post these.
- Done
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New Discussion:
Questions about Walter's presentation last week:
- Bob: This requires no BCI file?
- You introduce a tap index?
- Walter: The TX is independent.
- Having a tap increment implies there is a tap index.
- I added a parameter to identify it.
- Kumar: Increment only means increase or decrease equalization, it does not
imply an increment.
- Walter: I can send pointers to standards adreesing this.
- Are there any questions about the models I sent?
- My proposal satisfies the 3 requirements I described.
- Ambrish: What about future architectures?
- Walter: RXs are complicated, but every standard requires the same things for
TXs.
- But a TX doing something else could be invented.
- Ambrish: The models can go above and beyond what the protocol requires.
- Walter: In your files only the established TX features are used.
- Kumar: The TX can implement something that does not follow an equation.
- The RX will tell it only to increase or decrease, nothing else.
- The TX implements it however it wants.
- Walter: The TX can accept increments or coefficients, it works both ways.
- Kumar: The RX should make no assumptions about how the TX operates.
- Walter: There are generic TXs.
- Kumar: This is trying to legislate an architecture.
- Todd: Walter only suggests that taps and intervals are common.
- Ken: A premise of AMI is the algorithmic model is a black box.
- Todd: Walter is saying the BCI file adds complexity to keep it out of the AMI
file.
- Ken: The BCI file was to avoid new Reserved_Parameters.
- We would have faster resolution, no need for new BIRDs.
- Todd: We would need a committee to approve BCI files.
- Ken: It should be this committee.
- Todd: We will have to establish a new regime for controlling the BCI specs.
- Ken: That is one aspect of the proposal.
- Walter: To approve a BCI standard:
- Training patterns, that is simple.
- New keywords are more involved.
- Ambrish: Those need to be only in the string passed to the TX and RX.
- Walter: The only content in those strings will be tap increments and
coefficients.
- That will be true for 5 years.
- Even PCIe3 and 802.3bj have nothing newer.
- This proposal is to support Cadence IP.
- Why should other EDA companies support it?
- Ambrish: We have complex models that support multiple protocols.
- The protocol definitions are the best way to handle that.
- Todd: I don't think we captured those requirements.
- Walter: Right now there are only two protocols.
- I motion to vote on whether models should support multiple protocols.
- This should be asked separately of TX and RX.
- SiSoft will accept BIRD 147 if so.
- Kumar: It is common to have the same architecture for different protocols.
- Why is the BCI file a contentious issue?
- Walter: 100G is four 28G copper lines.
- 400G Ethernet will be 16x28G electrical.
- Training will never change for 802.3.
- There is no change from PCIe3 to PCIe4, and there will be no PCIe5.
- Where will new protocols come from?
- Todd: We need proof that new requirements are needed.
- Ambrish: We have documented the need.
- Todd: If you can't talk about it.
- Michael M.: Are we really saying a proprietary interface would not be
supported?
- Companies might agree to make something work a certain way, independent of
a formal protocol.
- Arpad: With proprietary you can't talk about it, how can you make a standard?
- Walter: You could agree to a private BCI file if the EDA tool knows nothing
about it.
- My proposal would not work for proprietary protocols, BIRD 147 would.
- It would be straightforward to add that capability to my proposal.
- A message string can be added.
- Kumar: We are not anticipating that.
- The communication between TX and RX should be as simple as possible.
- Abstracting it that way allows for applications we were not aware of.
- Todd: So we need to add:
- multi-protocol.
- a facility for private messaging.
- Kumar: When abstracted this way the EDA tool only needs to enable handshake.
- Walter: We would like to have it work with a TX that was not designed for a
protocol.
- This helps with design optimization.
- That market is important to us.
- Ambrish: That could be encapsulated in a BCI file.
- Walter: It must work with any TX.
- Kumar: BIRD 147 does not propose anything proprietary.
- How does the EDA tool come into the picture?
- Walter's proposal expects the TX to work on some equation.
- Arpad: Is this a question whether to use AMI for the same thing as BCI?
- Walter: This is about a solution for TXs that all work about the same way.
- Some expose indexes, some coefficients, and some both.
- They will work with any RX that understands the same parameter.
- We should have thought about this 5 years ago.
- Arpad: It should be done through AMI parameter?
- Walter: Yes.
- Ambrish: It should be in a file that both the TX and RX support.
- Arpad: How do we make a decision?
- Walter: The other EDA vendors should say what they want.
- Todd: Has Cadence presented a BCI file?
- Ambrish: No, just an abstracted example.
- Walter: There is a BCI for PCIe3?
- Ambrish: Yes.
- Todd: I would like to see BCI files for the KR and PCIe3 standards.
- This should be the first topic discussed next week.
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Next meeting: 06 May 2014 12:00pm PT
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IBIS Interconnect SPICE Wish List:
1) Simulator directives
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