Santa Clara, CA. “Standards are really cool—they don’t put you to sleep,” according to Karen Bartleson, senior director of corporate programs and initiatives at Synopsys. Delivering the Wednesday keynote address at DesignCon, she said, “Standards affect your personal and professional life every day. Standards make world go around.”
She added, “They protect us from harm, and they reduce cost of product development, providing a common platform on which innovations can be built. Imagine a world without 802.11.” Standards, she said, enable everything from smart cities and the Internet of Things to smart medical devices. “All exist because of standards.”
She continued, “Standards are interesting to develop. Sure, there are some dry points, but more often exciting times and occasionally insanity.” She described the process as “crazy competitive.”
Bartleson then presented “Ten Commandments for Effective Standards”:
- Cooperate on standards—compete on products. This is a point that the EDA industry failed to understand, she said, until customers pointed out that they could create their own EDA tools for less money than what they were paying to try to get nonstandard tools to work together.
- Use caution when mixing patents and standards. Patents represent the most contentious, dangerous, and powerful aspect of standards development. If a patent is implicated in a standard, the holder needs to be willing to license it on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.
- Know when to stop. Not everything should be standardized. She illustrated this point with a cartoon giraffe proposing a standard and quite long length for earrings. Less tall critters were not interested.
- Be truly open. “Open,” she said, “does not mean “free.” Standards do not magically pop out of thin air—they cost money to develop. People need to travel. But interested parties should be able to participate at a reasonable cost. Standards initiatives make use of various funding models—obtaining grants, for example, or charging membership fees or selling published documents.
- Realize there is no neutral party. Be on the lookout for hidden agendas.
- Leverage existing organizations and proven processes. If you are forming a new standards body, it probably doesn’t make sense to develop your own by laws.
- Think relevance. A standard won’t be widely adopted if there is no reason for it to exist. She cited WAVES for VHDL as an example of a standard that didn’t catch on.
- Recognize there is more than one way to create a standard. Formal organizations like IEEE and JEDEC have the cachet of brand name and are accredited by ANSI. But their processes can slow the development process down. A three- to six-year standards development process can span two semiconductor process-technology nodes. A consortium like Accellera will have its own rules but can more nimble. Another alternative is to use an open-source model.
- Start with contributions, not from scratch. Think long and hard about contributing.
- Know standards have both technology and business aspects. Engineers struggle with this point, she said.
She described herself as a “standards lifer” and encouraged DesignCon attendees to become standards lifers as well. And she urged those who don’t participate to respect the standards and the people who create them. She concluded with this proclamation: “Go forth and standardize!”
