Over the past week, I have had several email and phone requests regarding a less-than-well-understood topic: IEEE-ISTO. So, I’ll dedicate today’s blog to a PSA (public service announcement) to help others who may be similarly confused and get the main facts straight.

What is IEEE-ISTO? Well, to begin with it is not IEEE. I’d better repeat this main point: IEEE-ISTO is not the same as IEEE. IEEE-ISTO is a separate not-for-profit corporation that is legally separated from the IEEE and has a distinct membership. It’s function is to provide a service for its sponsors, such as legal structure, insurance policies, rudimentary program management, marketing communications, and finance management. The primary value proposition for target industry programs is generally the avoidance of establishing a separate legal entity, which costs in both time and redundant resource expenditures. IEEE-ISTO was formed in 1999, and today has 15 active programs.

It is essential to understand that, while IEEE and IEEE-SA develop true industry standards that must satisfy broadly accepted rules and procedures that protect against discriminatory or exclusive control (nearly identical to the standardization processes used at Si2), this dos not apply to IEEE-ISTO. In fact, IEEE-SA members are not involved with programs of the ISTO and vice-versa (other than by sheer coincidence of a participant working at a company that belongs to both organizations).

The reason why IEEE, IEEE-SA, and Si2 require non-discriminatory, non-exclusive, democratic processes for developing “standards” is the assurance that no single company can hold an entire industry hostage to advantage its own commercial product interests. Of course, a proprietary format / language in popular use may be accepted by the market as a good thing, but everyone understands the terms under which it is being accepted for use (more on what defines an open standard is at: http://chipdesignmag.com/bayer/2010/03/29/what-is-openness). IEEE-ISTO does not impose any of these requirements for their “industry programs”, so it requires a full case-by-case analysis of all details of the specific “program” to determine who has the control and under what terms.

IEEE-ISTO provides a useful service for certain “programs”… let’s just be very clear how ISTO’s “roll-your-own” dot-org service differs from an IEEE standard. Note that Si2 has also provided a very similar service under special request in several instances, including formation of the LEF/DEF TAB (for Cadence) and Liberty TAB (for Synopsys). Si2 policy requires that all public communications make it very clear that these do not qualify as “standards”, they are a special form of collaboration where there is single-company ownership and control, but with advisory input from other selected invitees. If one wishes a term for this category, I’ll suggest using the phrase “de facto standards”.

If you would like more details, you may visit the IEEE-ISTO website, such as this FAQ found at: http://www.ieee-isto.org/faqs .