The IEEE P1801 working group is making its way toward the final steps in IEEE ratification of the standard: balloting.  Now is the time for companies and organizations to join the group of balloters.  The deadline for signing up to ballot is Thursday, May 1, 2008, 11:59 PM Eastern Time.

To join the ballot group, contact Penny Stanton, IEEE-SA Balloting Center Administrator, at: sa-ballot @ ieee . org. 

P1801 will be an entity-based ballot which means “one company – one vote”.  This process offers freedom from blatant vote-stacking and promotes industry-relevant standards.  If your company or organization is already a corporate member of the IEEE Standards Association, you can join the ballot group and ballot without paying a balloting fee.  If your company or organization does not want to join the IEEE-SA, you can still join the ballot group and ballot by paying a per-ballot fee. 

You can check to see if your company or organization is a corporate member or find out who is your corporate member representative by contacting Patti Sulzer (p . sulzer @ ieee . org).  An IEEE-SA Corporate Member list is also available at: http://standards.ieee.org/sa-mem/corpmemlist.html

If your organization is not an IEEE-SA Corporate Member, but wishes to participate in this ballot, follow these instructions to become a member: http://standards.ieee.org/sa-mem/join.html#corporate

If your organization prefers to pay the per-ballot fee, please contact Penny Stanton, IEEE-SA Balloting Center Administrator, at: sa-ballot @ ieee . org.

The P1801 standard is descriptively named “Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power
Integrated Circuits”, and it is also affectionately known as UPF 2.0.  UPF, I’m sure you recall, is the Unifed Power Format standard from Accellera which is enjoying broad vendor and user support. 

The IEEE summary description of the P1801 standard is:

This standard establishes a format used to define the low power design intent for electronic systems and electronic intellectual property. The format provides the ability to specify the supply network, switches, isolation, retention and other aspects relevant to power management of an electronic system. The standard defines the relationship between the low power design specification and the logic design specification captured via other formats (e.g., standard hardware description languages). The standard provides portability of low power design specifications that can be used with a variety of commercial products throughout an electronic system design, analysis, verification and implementation flow.

Once P1801 completes the balloting process and gains approval from IEEE-SA governance, the “P” will be dropped and it will become the official IEEE 1801 standard for low power design and verification of today’s complex low-power ICs.

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