Meeting 7 Minutes

Teleconference, September 27th, 2004
A quorum of 12 out of 14 voting members was present.
Attendance is noted on the web site

1. Call to order

Meeting was called to order at 09:02 PST/16:02 GMT.

2. Approval of minutes from meeting 6

Silas McDermott moves to approve the minutes.
Darren Galpin seconds.
No objections/abstainers. The motion to approve the minutes was carried.

3. Discuss DASC governance review (informative)

There was a DASC steering committee meeting held a week ago. A mandate for a new process for compliance asked for a list of names of elected officials and members of the group . Also it required the election round and to provide by-laws to use or adapt for the group, all of which were provided. There has been no response with regard to the bylaws that the group submitted and it was not discussed in the meeting. We do believe that we have met all requirements however.

4. Review work plan

Last month there were some co-ordination meetings held in which it required Task Force leaders to provide a rough outlook for a work plan. Partial responses were received by various members and the following was initially agreed upon.

High Level Plan:

New LRM 0.2 has been posted on the web site. There are many issues from the Issue Tracking system which have now been updated in this LRM.

Any new work will go into LRM 0.3 by the end of January 2005 - this should contain all changes that we plan to implement.

WG will then decide on the key issues at this point

Rectification of all of these issues should be completed by April 2005 for LRM 0.4 if it meets the approval with a vote then we can initiate ballots for August. This schedule is a somewhat aggressive, so it will require a bit more activity then there has been recently - we will be looking for input from various members. A version of this time line will be posted on the web site.

5. Update on LRM Work

Over the last few weeks Ron, the editor has inserted most of the issues to date. (It is available on the posted 0.2 version). The new LRM should contain most of the fixes with a few for the interfaces. There are some other more complex issues still to be added however and these will be included in the LRM 0.3 along with any new issues found.

Currently the posted LRM is 10 MB's which is slightly large so will also provide downloading of individual chapters in a couple of weeks, once Ron is back from vacation.

Cristian: Will the original issues be re-assigned to LRM 0.2, or do we need to manually re-assign them?
Yaron : The issues will be automatically re-assigned.

6. Task force Activity updates

TF2 - Basic Language
Chris Macionski said that it had been quiet over the summer. Last action other than the LRM activity was the keyword issue. Christian is creating a document summing up the pros and cons of the different methods and will review these then present them to the group. This should be happening this weekend so the proposal should be ready by the end of the month ready for the next Working Group meeting.

TF3 - AOP
Matan Vax is on Holiday
Mirav Nitzan said that it had been quiet due to the various vacations. They had looked through the relevant parts of the LRM and there were no major issues. The only outstanding issues were the extensions to the methods and the visibility to the items on various extensions.

TF4 - Constraints and Generation
Ken Sailor - not present

TF5 - Coverage
Andy Piziali - not present
Darren Galpin reported that Andy and Darren are going over parts of the LRM which were not previously allotted. A couple of issues had been submitted, but Andy would be better placed to make a clearer statement over this.

TF6 - Temporals
David van Campenhout reported that there had been no activity since March, the next meeting is october and the bulk of their work is still to be done.

TF7 - TCM's
Matthew Morley - arrived late and reported that the task force was too small to do the level of work required - Yaron to take off line and discuss

TF8 - Foreign access
Pitchumani Guruswamy - not present

Cristian : Have Macros been assigned anywhere?
Yaron : Yes to the OAP group although no work has been done yet
Cristian: Is it not updated on the web for the AOP TF?
Yaron : I will check

7. Coordination with other projects

Other IEEE groups have expressed an interest in coordinating with our working group - this was mentioned at the DASC committee meeting and has also been mentioned on an individual level.

This would be with the aim of sharing information across the WG's to define interfaces or review processes etc. This group would have to express an interest. It was true that we planned to define Interfaces from e to our languages of choice.

        1) SystemC

Yaron : e has been used in conjunction with SystemC for high level models . The system C WG is an entity based WG so is made up of different companies but served by individuals. It would be good to define interface with feedback from this group - we may approach them on behalf of the group.

Meirav :The AOP TF are interested re the reflective interface

Darren : I believe that anything which makes it easier to integrate with other languages is good - maybe not make them too language specific and more generic.

David : I agree basically creating it on a language by language basis makes it too open ended and may create too much work.

Yaron : so we can to do one of two things
                1) Define Interface to SystemC or
                2) Interface layer is generic in language then document how to implement it to SystemC
                So is there interest?

Darren : Yes as the better the interface solutions the better we are

Joe Hupcey : Have they started yet?

Lori Kate : I have an update on the SystemC WG. It is WG number 1850. So far they have revised the PAR and submitted it but it is still not approved

Yaron : So it has not started in earnest yet. We can go back to them and co-ordinate when needed then
Lori kate : When par was discussed re Interfacing to other languages in the SystemC WG , WG 1647 was mentioned.

        2) SystemVerilog

Yaron : the SystemVerilog WG chair, Johny Srouji expressed interest in coordination between the languages. Again this would be a question of generic or specialized interfaces. There is a large range of options.
Matthew : SystemVerilog shares a lot more stuff so this may be a lot more work - would suggest leaving it alone
Chris Amlo: There is interest in co-ordinating SystemVerilog & PSL for extraction of coverage as additional sources other than Coverage points of gauging completeness.

Yaron : anybody require plain driving of data across e/systemVerilog mix?
Darren : We would use it purely as an HDL at first - so this would interest us most to begin with. Is a tighter integration than this required??

Yaron : I'll get beck to Johny and tell him we are interested but also clarify the areas of interest such as coverage, driving signals etc - I will then wait on a response and bring it back to the WG when I get some feedback.

Darren : Sounds good. Clarification is needed on what we wish to coordinate on!

        3) PSL
Yaron : This is another entity based DASC working group and they have an interest in embedding PSL in e
Darren : I Like the idea of embedding this in e to allow reuse as this should really show some benefits
Yaron : The General perception is that it can be done. David from the TE TF is in the accellera committee
David : VHDL/Verilog and other languages do it so theres no reason not to - it just means a lot of work. We are struggling with the LRM at present so have no time within our group to look at it.
Matthew : in Coordination - we're not exporting so we'll take it as a standard into e

Yaron : PSL is a tighter/narrower language - yes to Davids comment. The work would not be needed before the first release of the LRM is out. SystemVerilog are under schedule pressure as they have given themselves only one year. So would not want to be slowed down by other groups. We can incorporate it in a later revision, so we'll consider it as part of a later standard. So to summarize we have some interest dependents on details - I will explore further and come back to you at the next meeting when we can decide how to progress along these lines.

8. Other Business

No other issues were brought up.

9. 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.

8. Next meeting

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

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• Use the e-mail address you registered with

Next meeting is scheduled for Monday, November 15th at 9:00 AM pacific (same time as today's meeting).

9. Adjourn

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(Updated Wed Oct 11 16:18:31 PDT 2006)