[SJTAG]

 The System JTAG Working Group

Minutes of Weekly Meeting, 2009-01-26

Meeting called to order at 10:35 EST

1. Roll Call

Ian McIntosh
Adam Ley
Carl Nielsen
Carl Walker
Peter Horwood
Tim Pender

Excused:
Andrew Levy
Patrick Au
Brad Van Treuren
Heiko Ehrenberg
Eric Cormack

2. Review and approve previous minutes:

1/19/2008 minutes (draft circulated on 01/19, addendum on 1/20)

Corrections:

  • Neilsen -> Nielsen (Roll Call)
  • Misspelling at line 47 - liason should be liaison (topic 3)
  • Misspelling at line 160 - seperate should be separate (topic 4b, sect 3.4)
  • Missing word at line 191 - add "want" after "Do you" (topic 4b, sect 5)
  • Misspelling at line 191 - accomodate should be accommodate (topic 4b, sect 5)
  • Misspelling at line 212 - partion should be partition (topic 4d)
  • [Adam] That survey is now issued. -> [Andrew] That survey is now issued (topic 4d)

Insufficient attendees to approve minutes - deferred to next meeting;

3. Review old action items

  • Adam proposed we cover the following at the next meeting:
    • Establish consensus on goals and constraints
    • What are we trying to achieve?
    • What restrictions are we faced with?
  • Establish whether TRST needs to be addressed as requirements in the ATCA specification if it is not going to be managed globally (All)
  • Adam review ATCA standard document for FRU's states
  • Patrick contact Cadence for EDA support person.
  • All to consider what data items are missing from Data Elements diagram
  • All: do we feel SJTAG is requiring a new test language to obtain the information needed for diagnostics or is STAPL/SVF sufficient?
    See also Gunnar's presentation, in particular the new information he'd be looking for in a test language
    (http://files.sjtag.org/Ericsson-Nov2006/STAPL-Ideas.pdf)
  • Adam: (continue) revise wording of section 5
    • [Adam] No progress to report. I think I can get to this in the next week.
    • [Ian] We're not desperate for this. If you can manage it sometime in the next two weeks, that'd be good.
  • Ian: (continue) revise wording of section 3.1
    • [Ian] I've update section 3.1 of the main document. I also added the comment to 2.4 on excluding proxies from minute approvals.
  • All: Review and respond to forum post for Follow-up survey (http://forums.sjtag.org/viewtopic.php?t=83)

4. Discussion Topics

  1. Follow-up survey
    • [Ian] I notice that Tim has posted a reply to the forum post, I think really looking to clarify a couple of things in my top post. Peter also raised a question; What respondent's attitude to adopting SJTAG?
    • [Peter] Yes, that's right. Do they have a specific intent to use SJTAG or are they merely "observing". That could help to validate how seriously to take any other answers given.
    • [Ian] I had some related suggestions; to ask whether people saw some of the other JTAG related standards like IJTAG and 1149.7 as things that had be accommodated by SJTAG.
    • [Ian] Not everyone we survey is going to be an active user of JTAG, some may be consultants like Eric, some managers - a group that we rather missed the first time. Referring back to our last survey, we had several roles identified, but if we're going to partition the survey into "streams" then we probably need broader headings. As a first stab, I might see these as "Practitioners", "Educators", "Managers" and "Vendors". Are these too broad or too narrow?
    • [Peter]I think it's more important to find out how serious the survey user is. Maybe along with the related standards question.
    • [Ian] Without splitting into role specific questions?
    • [Peter] Yes. If it's a designer, are they likely to design-in SJTAG? Will a manager be prepared to invest in putting SJTAG into a product.
    • [Ian] OK. That makes the survey easier to construct, and I'm in favour of reducing the amount of work I need to do!
    • [Tim] Can the survey have something like a text box? Sometimes when you see one question it can trigger another thought. It wouldn't be something that's easy to include in the survey results, though.
    • [Ian] Yes, we had several text boxes for free form entry in the last survey, so that's not a problem. You can get very useful feed back from those, even if you can't use them in a numerical analysis of responses.
    • [Ian] Did anyone take the iNEMI JTAG Adoption Survey?
    • [Carl W] I expect to complete it.
    • [Ian] I found there was an attention on BSDL file accuracy in that survey that surprised me. Are bad vendor BSDLs still a problem? It's not an issue I've really seen for some time.
    • [Tim] I recently downloaded a BSDL file and it failed syntax check so it could never have been validated against silicon.
    • [Adam] There is some concern on BSDL files, and part of the iNEMI survey is collect information to present a uniform view of the plight of users in relation to the issues they may be having.
    • [Ian] Years ago, we saw lots of bad BSDLs, but now it's more likely to be parts with incomplete 1149.1 compliance that cause us problems. It may be that the range of parts we use is limited compared to other companies, so we're just not seeing the problem.
    • [Adam] There seems to be a lot of cases where someone has gone back to their vendor and said "We need this feature" only to be told "You're the only one asking for that: We don't have the funds to develop that right now". The iNEMI survey will hopefully show that in some of these cases the problem is much wider.
    • [Adam] There is an almost continuous stream of new adopters of 1149.1 amongst device vendors. When their first product comes out it inevitably has errors and BSDL problems are often just the start of bigger issues.
    • [Ian] OK, should we keep clear of material that iNEMI is collecting, such as the BSDL question?
    • [Carl W] I think we should let iNEMI deal with the BSDL issue.
    • [Ian] The Survey was supposed to be fill-in topic over the run-in to Christmas, but things didn't work out. Maybe the best way forward now is for me to draft up a sample form for discussion later.
    • [Peter] Sounds OK.
    • [Ian] OK, I'll try to draft up some sort of outline survey form that we can discuss, maybe in two weeks time. {Action}

  2. White Paper section status
    • [Ian] I know that there has been no progress on the White Paper recently, but we need to be getting back to the "real work" of SJTAG, so I'd like to go over each of the sections to see what the plans are for moving them forward.
    • [Ian] Volume 1, Overview, we had decided was as complete as we could make for now.
    • [Ian] Heiko isn't on the call today, but Peter, have you had any dialogue with Heiko on what still needs done with Volume 2, Use Cases?
    • [Peter] No, not really.
    • [Ian] Looking through it, there quite a bit of text in there, but a lot of the lower level sub-sections still need filled out. That includes the Value Propositions which we were considering moving into Volume 5.
    • [Ian] Carl and Carl, there has been some talk of notes that needed written up for some time for Volume 3, Hardware?
    • [Carl N] Yes, I've spent some time thinking about these things - they're more ideas on the types of things I want to put in there, but I haven't found a way to set them out for the document. I really need to try to get the ideas down somehow so they can be discussed.
    • [Ian] Remember you can always put your sketched ideas on the "discussion" tab in the wiki - that way other people can also take a look and maybe make suggestions.
    • [Carl N] Yes, that's true.
    • [Ian] Volume 4, Languages: At the moment I've only started to fill out the front matter, nothing substantial. We don't have a team assigned to this document yet, but I'm guessing that it's likely to need a collaboration between Brad, Heiko, Adam and myself. I think this needs a bigger team.
    • [Adam] I'm ready to assist with this.
    • [Ian] I think the whole languages and data aspect are going to be crucial to SJTAG and this may well be the biggest document and the hardest to write, as there's still a lot we need to discuss on this subject.
    • [Adam] I would agree that this is a key subject.
    • [Ian] On Volume 5, Business Case, apart from the value propositions, I don't think we have a clear picture on what will be going in here. We might get some indicators from the survey. Volume is going to need to sell SJTAG to the unconvinced. Perhaps we can find some case study examples that we can use to help illustrate the benefits?
    • [Ian] Apart from this week, given that we've had bigger turnouts recently perhaps we can re-think our teams for each White Paper section. Maybe if we have three or four people on each group instead of two then we might make more progress. I think we can use some of the next meeting to try to get more people into the teams.

5. Schedule next meeting

Monday Feb 02, 2009, 10:30am EST
Monday Feb 09, 2009, 10:30am EST
Monday Feb 16, 2009, 10:30am EST
Monday Feb 23, 2009, 10:30am EST

6. Any other business

  • [Ian] The deadline for ITC papers is about five weeks away. I'd like to speak with Brad and Heiko to see if we think there's value in submitting a paper this year.
  • [Ian] I think a lot of "observers" are keen to see us move into the formal PAR stage. We felt we were close to that when Brad was chair; we can't be any less close, but it feels that way right now. I intend to review the on-line PAR form as far as I can to see if there is anything that we might need to think about some more - we already have the Scope and Purpose and something on the Reason for the Project. {Action}

7. Review new action items

  • Ian: Draft sample questionnaire by 02/09
  • Ian: Review PAR form for any questions that may require discussion

8. Adjourn

Moved to adjourn at 11:24am EST by Tim, seconded by Carl W.

Respectfully submitted,
Ian McIntosh

Copyright 2007-2009 The SJTAG Working Group
The SJTAG Initiative is "work-in-progress" and the views and opinions expressed here are subject to change without prior notice.