Meet the Opal Authors
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Welcome to our blog. Dr. Michael Steinberger, Todd Westerhoff, and Dr. Walter Katz are the primary authors of Opal™: Best Practices for IBIS-AMI Modeling. Combined, the three of us have been working in the EDA and signal integrity field for over 100 years. Mike Steinberger is an expert in Micro-Wave signal analysis, doing some of the early work in satellite communications at Bell Labs. Mike was an early innovator of applying microwave analysis techniques to high speed computing at Cray. Todd Westerhoff has held key technical and marketing roles in EDA companies and has also managed signal integrity groups in major systems companies, including Cisco. Walter Katz has developed widely used auto-routers and, more recently, applied similar techniques to the automation of signal integrity analysis of high-speed parallel interfaces and serial link analysis.
As leaders in the development of high-speed serial link analysis, we have been committed to help both developers of serial link buffer IP, and the users of the resulting silicon. SiSoft is also committed to open standards. In order to build models with sufficient accuracy and performance to allow both silicon designers and silicon users to make informed engineering decisions, we identified a number of best practices to be followed by developers of AMI models, and published new model specific parameters to pass critical information to the EDA tools that need to either prepare the inputs to the AMI models or analyze the results of AMI models.
We look foward to your feedback on the Opal document and will be happy to answer any questions or comments about us, SiSoft, and in particular, about the Opal document itself.
Mike, Todd, Walter
Walter Katz
6/12/2010 11:37:00 AM
Comments:
Response to: Meet the Opal Authors
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Jennifer Martin says:
How should I tell my IC Vendor that he must deliver Opal quality models?
Response to: Meet the Opal Authors
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Todd Westerhoff says:
Good question! The best time to have a discussion with vendors about models and model quality is when you're first deciding to use their component. If you can, involve your purchasing department and have the vendor commit to delivering Opal-quality models as part of your company's decision to use their devices. You can refer the vendor to this website for info about Opal, and to SiSoft if they need assistance implementing these guidelines in their models.
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