Meeting 18 Minutes

Teleconference, November 2nd, 2005
A quorum of 18 out of 29 voting members present.

1. Call to order

Meeting was called to order at 09:00 PST/17:00 GMT.

2. Approval of minutes from meeting 17

Darren Galpin moves to approve the minutes as posted.
Matan seconds.
No objections/abstainers. The motion to approve the minutes was carried.

3. Review Ballot Results

The Ballot was closed on October the 27th, with a 100% returns on the ballot so everybody registered on the balloting pool actually voted. There are 56 members, 55 of them voted to approve and 1 abstained. There were no negative votes.
All in all we received 69 comments, from 6 reviewers. 4 of the reviewers have provided one comment each and the remaining two reviewers contributed the rest.
Based on a rough classification over 40 of the comments are just editorial things like typos. There is a smaller number that are technical clarification questions, like, for instance, which of the string methods actually returns a copy of the string versus the original string.

Comments can be marked as "must be resolved". Non of the comments we received is marked this way, which means non of the comments are gating items for submitting the draft to RevCom.

At the same time, we must consider all the comments, and the draft can be improved by addressing them.

This is pretty rare to get such a high return rate and that there are no rejections, a testimony to the quality of work that was done by the working group and by the editor.

4. Comment Resolution Process

All the ballot comments are added to the issues tracking system, so if anybody has an interest in reviewing those, they're posted as issues relating to Draft 5.

Avi : I already added some comments to some of those issues so people may see those.

Yaron : yes, thank you, I saw your email this morning and responded to it.

Yaron: As far as how we go about resolving the issues - we're obliged to adress all the comments. I recruited the help of Avi and Matan as well as Joe and myself are going to go through these issues and resolve them. Based on the review, none of these issues are really fundamental, all of them are about changing the documentation as opposed to changing anything in the language so I really don't feel theres a whole lot of work for the working group.

Proposed time line:

Draft 6 with these minor fixes posted on the website on November 14th
The working group will vote to approve draft 6 for re-circulation on November 21st
The draft will be re-circulated for a 10 day review by the end of November

Joe : The only material that gets reballoted is just the minor changes that we're making, therefore votes can not change regarding material that did not change between the revisions. In that process if you've previously voted yes then your yes vote is still counted unless you state otherwise.

Yaron : I want to mention some of the more significant comments (neither typos nor minor technical clarifications):

A request to add add an exit code to the library call fatal(). Right now you can call fatal with a string and it will exit, but the exit code given to the OS is not controlled. This should be a good enhancement request to table for the next revision.
A request to use # as a comment sign (must be rejected as it conflicts with #define)

There's some discussion about sized and unsized numbers. But this was put forward by someone coming from a software background and unaware of the HDL standards that we are trying to match. I'll highlight that in our communication with him and hopefully resolve the issue. Also theres another issue about stubs files and simulation interfaces that we don't talk about them, we'd like to see if we can add some text describing them.

Everybody is welcome to review the issues - they are all available in the issue tracking system on the website. Any decisions we will make about any of the issues will be documented there. Draft 6 will reference the issue numbers for easy correlation between the change and the comment.

All inputs regarding ballot comments should be received by next monday as we want to be on time for the November 14th timeline.

5. Other Business

Matan : After the standard was released I ran into some places which need some pretty much editorial changes some typos etc shall I open an issue on them. They were under my responsilbility

Yaron : Typos can be filed in the issue tracking system by Monday. Other changes are inappropriate at this time.

Matan : these are just a couple of typos.

Joe Hupsey : I will be on my vacation during the next meeting, is there any way I can retain my voting rights. What do I need to do, will a tell you in advance of any review issues

Yaron : please review the docs and let me know of any issues and if not then please let me know if you're in support. I don't think we'll need to count the votes but its permitted by DASC guidelines for people who have missed a meeting but have commented about the meeting - can be counted as present

5. Patent policy

The chair has issued a call for essential patents, in compliance with current IEEE/SA PatCom guidelines. The WG members are advised to review the call for essential patents and the patent related slide presentation posted on the web site .

6. Next meeting

Please remember to send in your e-mail to rollcall@ieee1647.org so that your attendance on this call is registered.

• Please DON'T send these e-mails to the reflector
• Use the e-mail address you registered with

The next meeting will be on Monday 21st November at 09:00 AM Pacific time, 17:00 UTC.
Note that this meeting has been posted on the website agenda page mid October, to maintain a 30 day notice period.

7. Adjourn

IEEE/SA home
IEEE Standards Association

DASC Home
Design Automation Standards Committee

VLSG Home
Verification Language Study Group

The 1647 PAR
Project Authorization Form

(Updated Wed Oct 11 16:19:18 PDT 2006)