Standards Focus


	April 2007

May Seminar in Tunis
The "IEEE Global Standards and Developing Economies: Broadband Access and Infrastructure Seminar" will be held in Tunis, Tunisia, 9 and 10 May 2007. This free seminar, which is sponsored by the IEEE-SA Corporate Program, will highlight how to participate in and make use of global wireless and wired access standards and best practices at the local level.

Presenters will come from global companies (Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Nortel, Mentor Graphics, France Telecom and Sony) and standard development organizations (ITU and ETSI). Other speakers will include Dr. Montasser Ouaili of the Tunisian Ministry of Communication Technologies and the Honorable Robert F. Godec, the US Ambassador to Tunisia.

A CAG quarterly meeting will occur in conjunction with the seminar. Attendees are invited to participate in this meeting.

Since space at the seminar is limited, please register for it as soon as possible. Contact the IEEE-SA Corporate Standards office at +1 732-562-5342 or by emailing corp-stds@ieee.org

CAG Schedule Set
The Corporate Advisory Group has firmed up the timing of its meetings in 2007 and set a tentative schedule for 2008. Key dates are:

2007 CAG meetings

9 May (afternoon) and 11 May (all day) in Gammarth-Tunis, Tunisia
28-29 August in New York City, NY, USA, hosted by IBM
29-30 November in Hallandale Beach, FL Florida, USA (with the IEEE-SA governance meeting series)

2008 CAG meetings (tentative)

4-5 March, venue to be determined
13-14 May in Japan
21-22 August in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, hosted by Nortel
4-5 December in Florida, USA (with the IEEE-SA governance meeting series)

Candidates Invited for CAG Election

Elections for two members-at-large in the Corporate Advisory Group, which oversees the IEEE-SA Corporate Program, will be held later this year. These positions will be filled through an election by the IEEE-SA corporate members. Those elected will serve two-year terms starting 1 January 2008.

Candidates must hold strategic positions at corporations that are corporate members of IEEE-SA (or that are willing to join) and have a vested interest in managing the development of industry standards. Anyone who wants to submit their name for election to the CAG should send their biography and photo to Rona Gertz by 25 May.

Global Activities Pick Up Steam

The IEEE-SA Corporate Program has had a global reach since it began in 2004. In the last three years, its activities have extended to Europe and Asia and, this May, to North Africa. Here’s a rundown of some of the program's recent international initiatives.

To begin with, the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group (CAG), which oversees the program, held its quarterly meeting in Paris, France, in early February. Senior standards and technology managers from large European companies joined the meeting as guests, including those from Alcatel-Lucent, France Telecom, Qualcomm, Renault, Siemens and Synopsys. This meeting, which was hosted by France Telecom, reinforced the program's alignment with the corporate and standards communities in Europe and opened the door to deeper ties with them.

Revisiting China

In March, several members of the CAG who also serve on the IEEE-SA Standards Board and the IEEE-SA Board of Governors-- Steve Mills, Don Wright, Chuck Adams and Phil Wennblom - participated in IEEE standards seminars in Beijing and Shenzhen, China. The seminars introduced dozens of Chinese companies to IEEE's standards programs and its new intellectual property policy.

While there, the team met with major Chinese companies. Visits to Huawei Technologies and ZTE followed up those made in 2006, while initial meetings were held with China Mobile, Haier, and TCL. One of the goals of these meetings was to foster understanding of both the Individual and Corporate Standards Programs and open the door for participation in them.

"Our momentum in China is clearly picking up," said Steve Mills, CAG vice-chair. "A good example of this is that Thomas Lee, who is Vice General Manager in the Standards Department at Huawei, joined the CAG for a one-year stint in January."

Mills cites the visit to the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), the government body that oversees internal standards, as another example of increased communication. This discussion focused on preparing a memorandum of understanding for collaboration and cooperation between the IEEE Standards Association and CESI. At the meeting, CESI provided a draft of the memo for IEEE-SA review.

"This trip was highly successful," said Mills. "Many Chinese companies were interested in the program and two expressed interest in creating standards with us. One has since begun the process of doing so."

Tunis in May

The next stop for the Corporate Program is North Africa. This will take the form of a 1-1/2-day seminar in Tunis on May 9 and 10 on global standards and developing economies (see News Notes below) and a CAG quarterly meeting. It will also be a springboard for outreach to companies in Europe and North Africa.

"We've made great strides in fulfilling our mission as a global standards group," said Mills. "Long-term, we intend to have equal distribution across all geographies and create a welcoming environment so companies from developing economies can create the standards they need here."

Taking the Corporate Program to the Next Level

-- Chuck Adams, Corporate Advisory Group Chair

These are heady times for the Corporate Program. We have realized many of the goals we set when the program began three years ago. For example, we have formed a solid infrastructure for standards development, built a corporate community of over 70 companies, completed six corporate standards and have another 10 underway.

Even as we continue to follow our initial objectives, we are embracing new ones to help companies better meet their standards needs in a changing world. These focus on expanding our global presence and attending to what we call the standards life cycle.

Internationally, we will continue to work for the global adoption of IEEE standards and foster our connection to global standards development organizations. We also will accelerate our outreach to developing countries, especially by scheduling quarterly meetings in diverse regions and inviting major companies to participate in them.

Life Cycle Activities

The Corporate Program does an excellent job of supporting the creation of corporate standards. We now plan to migrate upstream and downstream and embrace the entire standards life cycle from pre-standards support to gaining market acceptance for a standard. The latter might include such activities as certification, education, and branding and other marketing steps.

Our goal in this is to give companies all the services they need in one place to bring standards into being and to enable the successful use of those standards. We have begun to explore this concept through a new ad hoc committee that contains members from the CAG and staff from the IEEE Standards Association and the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. We'll share more about this broad activity as it evolves.

Two Standards Get Underway

Two new standards projects recently joined eight others underway within the Corporate Program.

One of these is IEEE P1900.4™, "Architectural Building Blocks Enabling Network-Device Distributed Decision Making for Optimized Radio Resource Usage in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks." This standard, which is a part of the broader effort to create standards that enable dynamic spectrum access, will allow multimodal devices to make optimal use of several available radio resources at once. The goal is to improve wireless system efficiency, capacity, and quality of service by exploiting information exchanged between a network and mobile terminals.

The other new project involves IEEE P1450.6.1™, "Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression." IEEE P1450.6.1 will describe on-chip scan compression structures, operation and connectivity so electronic design automation tools can interoperate for pattern generation and diagnosis. It will address how information passes from scan insertion to pattern generation and from pattern generation to diagnosis, so different tool vendors can be used for each step independent of on-chip scan compression logic.

For further information on these projects, contact corp-stds@ieee.org

Candidates Invited for CAG Election

Elections for two members-at-large in the Corporate Advisory Group, which oversees the IEEE Corporate Standards Program, will be held later this year. These positions will be filled through an election by the members of the program. Those elected will serve two-year terms starting 1 January 2008.

Candidates must hold strategic positions at corporations that are Corporate members of IEEE-SA (or that are willing to join the program) and have a vested interest in managing the development of industry standards. Anyone who wants to submit their name for election to the CAG should email their biography and photo to Rona Gertz by 25 May.


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