1st e-HSSI working group meeting Attendees: Sophie Baron, Jorgen Christiansen, John Evans, Stefan Haas, Peter Lichard, Gianluca Aglieri Rinella, Csaba Soos General comments: 1. EN-ICE-DEM plays an important role in the design flow. They should be trained too, which might be difficult to expect, because most of them are not CERN staff. How should we work efficiently with them ? What can we expect from them ? How much control do we have on what they are doing ? 2. Model verification might be too resource demanding. Shall we do that ? 3. What should be the 'threshold' (speed, transmission line length etc.) beyond which we should start worrying ? Shall we rely only on application notes provided by chip manufacturers ? 4. We don't want to start an R&D, but we must ensure that the systems we are going to design in the future will work. 5. We should avoid treating the high-speed interconnects with 'pass-or-fail' type tests. We have to consider using proper performance benchmarking (e.g. BER). Tools: 1. Ansoft DesignerSI looks interesting. It will include in one suite HFSS, Q3D Extractor, and SIwave. 2. Using AnsoftLinks we can extract from databases of third-party EDA tools (e.g. Cadence). 3. Mentor's HyperLynx is often used for high-speed link designs. Shouldn't we try it out. According to Sophie the interface is quite intuitive. 4. Cadence's Allegro PCB SI is nicely integrated into the Cadence design flow, but it is probably less accurate than true 3D solvers. External contacts: 1. EN-ICE-DEM through Peter. 2. Javier Serrano from the WhiteRabbit project. 3. Jean-Pierre Cachemiche (Marseille). Lot of experience in the domain. Should ask him about PCB materials, manufacturing, and acceptance tests. He should be invited to make a seminar on this subject. 4. Magnus Hansen and Gregory Iles (GCT project). Evaluation and testing: 1. We could use commercial development platforms meant for high-speed characterization to perform tests. We could, as well, learn from the manufacturers of those boards by looking at the design files. 2. We should try to apply the design methods on a project which is going to be launched in the near future (e.g. N62 concentrator (Peter), GBT tester (Sophie), GBT concentrator (?)) We agreed to meet in February (exact date to be announced). In the meantime we will try to evaluate the tools which are currently available in CERN.