March 5,2010

Minutes of today's IEEE 1149.1 - Initialize Sub-Group Meeting

Attendees:
Dave Dubberke
Ken Parker
Roland Latvala
Francisco Russi
Sivakumar V
John Braden
Carol Pyron

Minutes:

Today we continued discussions of BSDL attributes for side file support. Ken brought up again that the hierarchical 
referencing of registers should be kept as simple as possible. Carol brought up how that associating the TDR bit fields 
with specific ports/pins in the BSDL may in some cases be conditional based on the state of other global bits, or powered 
down pin groups. Therefore it was thought that this TDR bit to Port association should remain optional. Although it was 
agreed that for majority of the cases this mapping would likely be straight forward.

It was also discussed that for mnemonic attributes it may not be practical to create mnemonics for all 
possibilities and that perhaps Illegal or Reserved mnemonics should be provided. Also discussioned about how to 
specify thousands of bits in the BSDL for cases where than might be needed. Formats like 1000'b0 might be useful. 
Question came up whether mnemonics should be allowed in the PDL side files too, and whether rules about PDL comment structure 
should be provided for the side file.

Additionally we discussed use model with respect to GUI based tools for reading in the BSDL or previously generated 
PDL file to then be configured for specific board test scenario and a PDL could them be written out. These same tools 
could write out side file information in tester specific formats, Stil, Wgl, SVF, etc directly also. Regardless 
it was felt that the PDL file should still be the baseline file format that could then be reused by other ATE equipment 
without need to regenerate the PDL for each platform. 

Also had a short discussion about configuration management for naming the PDL files, or commenting them internally for 
unique instances of a components per board based on reference designator(s) that share the same PDL file.

Lastly it was discussed that we are making good progress on the Initialize sub-group, and that we would like 
our work to be included in this 2010 version of the 1149.1 Standard. It was generally agreed that industry would frown 
upon two successive releases 2010, 2011 of the standard if Initialze is not allowed to be included into the 2010 version, 
and required to be released the following year. Ken brought up that using a normative annex may speed the integration 
process allowing us to work in parallel with the main body of the Standard.

Actions:
1. Carol to provide a real world chip with INIT requirements in order to generate a true to life BSDL 
example for discussion.
2. Carol to email the Reflector about allowing time for us to finish our Initialize sub-group work before releasing
the new P1149.1 2010 for baloting.

Next meeting date:
Same time next Friday March 12th.