P1450.1 / P1450.2 Working Group Meeting

Held Friday, Oct 1st, 1999, 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Room 315 Atlantic City Convention Center
In conjunction with ITC 1999

In Attendance:
Doug Sprague IBM
Tony Taylor Fluence
Kim Smith Microchip
Nathan Biggs Priority Technologies, Inc.
Dave Dowding Fluence
Masaharu Goto HP
Klaus-Dieter Hilliges HP R&D
Ernie Wahl Lucent
Bernard Hiebler SZ Testsystemes
Greg Maston Fluence

Meeting Schedule:

    8:30-10:00         1450.1 Design Stimulus
    10:00-12:00       1450.2 DC Levels

Pat McHugh from TTTC addressed the group regarding the groups. Discussed how to get ATE companies involved in the 1450.3 meeting. Suggested putting a blurb in the trade magazines and going directly to the companies through a participant like Intel.

Agenda:
    Required ballot schedule
    Review of document

Tony: Some elements are clear additions and some things are minor tweaks. The things that clearly modify STIL statements need to be rolled back into the STIL spec. This can be done as a supplement to the 1450-1999 STIL document.

P1500 Requirements (Tony) Want to have a document by the end of 1999 that describes CTL. Then ready to ballot by the beginning of 2000. CTL may do a trial use standard to see if it works with the hardware side of P1500.

Most of the CTL constructs are being placed in the Environment block. At a P1500 meeting held earlier during ITC week, the CTL group reviewed proposed syntax that puts the CTL statements into a CTL block inside the Environment block. The proposal is to have blocks within the Environment as follows:

Environment {
        …General environment statements
        Design { … design specific statements …}
        CTL { … core test language statements …}
        Other blocks tbd { … }
        } // end of Environment block

The definition of statement within the "Design" block are to be defined by the P1450.1 standard, while the definition of statements within the "CTL" block are to be defined by the P1500 standard.

MG: Each of the patterns in a PatternBurst are under the same timing. How do we specify asynchronicity in this case. KDH: Perhaps the patterns and timing should be associated at a higher level, maybe the test flow. What about leaving the parallel pat list where it is, and then also add parallel capability at the test method level.

There are two applications for parallel patterns: 1) patterns on separate ports of a device that run asynchronously, and 2) patterns that may be run independently on separate functions of a device (possible embedded cores). The requirements for the independent running of patterns may be better served by having completely separate data blocks in STIL defining the signals, groups, timing, and patterns.

Tony: What about specifying pairs of patternbursts and timing together in the patternexec (or burst)?

Who would be interested in fleshing "Parallel Pattern Issue":
            Klaus-Dieter Hilliges, Kim Smith, TT, EW, BH, NB, DS, MG, GM, DD, PW

 AI: Nathan will send email out to the list on this issue to get things started.

Environment Block:
What about inherit? Suggestion that Inherit is allowed anyplace in the Env hierarchy. Then define Inherit as either strong or weak for overriding the data that is in there.

Kim and Greg want a locally scoped UserKeywords statement inside of the Environment block. Could call it "EnvironmentKeywords" to avoid collisions. How about "LocalKeywords"?

It was proposed to add LocalKeywords into the .0 spec. The need for this has already shown up in uses of the 1450 standard.

DC Levels:
The second half of the meeting (after 10:00) was focused on the DC Levels syntax.

Dave Dowding presented an applications example of a program flow that required different DC levels to be established based on the way the various nodes of the flow were transitioned. The details of the example are to be given to Gregg Wilder to include in the DC Levels document.

Although not all of the DC levels interests were present at the meeting (i.e., the leader Gregg Wilder was not present), it was the general conclusion that the last syntax that the group has arrived at does indeed work for a significant application. This document is ready for final clean up and review.

Next Meeting:
Dallas meeting on December 9-10. Hosted by TI.

Adjourned:
Meeting adjourned at 12:00 p.m.