ARLINGTON, Va., 24 Feb. 2006. Officials of the Government Electronics and Information Association (GEIA) in Arlington, Va., are releasing a new standard that defines behavior descriptions of interconnect electrical characteristics.
Printed circuit boards, cables, connectors, device packages, and other media for passive electrical communication are becoming more complex as systems shrink in size and increase in portability and power.
System designers must be able to analyze the electrical behavior of the interconnects they use to ensure functionality and clean signaling, yet before now no standard format has existed to permit exchange of interconnect electrical description information between hardware designers, electronic design automation (EDA) tool vendors, and their respective customers.
GEIA-STD-0001, the IBIS Interconnect Modeling (ICM) Specification, addresses this need by providing a universal method for representing interconnect modeling data for transfer between design and simulation tools.
The ICM format is "human-readable" plain text but can also be parsed easily by software, allowing tool and hardware vendors to write models compatible with their own products.
Model creation is simple under ICM for designers and customers, GEIA officials say, yet ICM establishes a firm data structure for reliable parsing. While using the same behavioral, keyword-driven approach as IBIS, ICM is a separate specification.
The standard is available from the GEIA online store at www.geia.org.
