SLDS-Semantics Working Group

DAC 2001 Meeting, Las Vegas, Wednesday 20 2001

Participants:

Roberto Passerone, Cadence Design Systems, Chair
David Barton, Titan Corp.
Joe Daniels, Accellera
Peter Ashenden, Ashenden Designs
Joern Janneck, UC Berkeley
Steve Neuendorffer, UC Berkeley
Marcia Cirstea, De Moutfart University
Alex Zamfirescu, ASC
Greg Peterson, Univ. Tennessee
Perry Alexander, Univ. of Kansas
Dennis Brophy, Accellera

Order of the day

1. Presentation, charter, mission
2. Administra-trivia
3. GSRC Semantics Project, Ptolemy II presentations

Charter

The SLDS-Semantics Working Group is formed under the System Level Design Standards (SLDS) committee within Accellera. Along with the Semantics Working Group, the SLDS committee includes the C Working Group, headed by Brian Bailey (Mentor Graphics) and the Rosetta Working Group, headed by Perry Alexander (University of Kansas). Other committees may be established in the future under the umbrella of SLDS to address specific needs. During the meeting the following charter was proposed for the Semantics Working Group

The Semantics Working Group works on the definition and the standardization of principles used in the construction of design languages for electronic systems

No objections were moved to the charter. The charter implies that the mission of the Semantics Working Group is not to create a new language, but rather define standard ways to classify the features of different languages. While the group does not intend to create a new language for describing systems, the group might (should) work on the definition of a standard concrete representation for the above classification.

Membership

The list of members of the Semantics Working Group will be posted on the web. We are currently organizing the group into 3 levels

Active members, that work on the standard document
Participating members, that provide feedback and attend the meetings
Observing members, that subscribe to the mailing list and occasionaly participate to meetings

We are currently seeking more participation at the active level, especially from the industry. The web site will be composed of a public section with general information, announcments, general presentations, etc. A password protected section will be used for the development of the documents which will be posted on the public section for review at each release.

Administrative

Charter: The charter will be provided to the board for approval.

Deliverables: The group shall prepare a roadmap with milestones for deliverables. We currently have two deliverables:

A Semantics Reference Manual that includes the definition of an abstract syntax and an abstract semantics that are suitable for the classification and the description of different design languages
A Meta-language definition that provides a syntax for the representation of the above abstract concepts.

- My objective is to have an initial version of the Semantics Reference Manual by DAC 2002. This version will follow the current outline of the document and will be based on the work of Ptolemy II at UC Berkeley. An initial version of the syntax for the meta-language should be released in the same time frame.
- The first release should be followed by a period of feedback from the industry. Concurrently the group will start incorporating the feedback from the GSRC Semantics Project. A second version of the standard could be released by DAC 2003. During this time frame I expect to see some application of the standard being developed by the industrial participants.
- The period from DAC 2003 to DAC 2004 would be used for consolidating the standard and provide a final document for standardization.

Note that I consider these timelines highly tentative and uncertain.

Bylaws: The group should be equipped with a set of bylaws. A template for these will be provided by Dave Barton, chair of SLDS, by July 15. The group will then review the bylaws, change them as appropriate, and provide them to the board for approval.

Donations: The group will most probably accept donations from external institutions. The process for accepting donations and the paperwork involved is currently under revision at the level of the board. I am closely following this issue as it may somewhat impact our operations. Updates will be posted on the mailing list as soon as they are available.

Technical presentations

Alex Zamfirescu proposed that the group look at the IEEE 1600.1 standard on Upper Ontology. More information to be found at http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo

Joern Janneck (post-doc, UC Berkeley) presented the views of the GSRC Semantics Project and Stephen Neuendorffer (Graduate Student Researcher, UC Berkeley) presented the Ptolemy II framework. While these two projects are somewhat related, they do take a slightly different approach: more abstract the former which is based on a mathematical formulation of the syntax and the semantics; more practical the latter which, while still built on top of formal foundations, is based on the Ptolemy II implementation. The charter of our group is closer to that of the GSRC Semantics Project. However the results and the time frame for the GSRC Semantics Project are highly uncertain. The proposal is therefore to start our operations based on the more established Ptolemy II framework, start experimenting to test the limits of the proposed approach, and provide feedback while incorporating the more abstract formulation of the GSRC Semantics Project. Industrial participation and applications in real examples are key at this point to the development of a standard that could benefit the industry at large.

More information on the GSRC Semantics Project can be found at http://gigascale.org/semantics

More information on the Ptolemy II project can be found at http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu