It’s always exciting when a new standard activity launches.  There’s hope and expectations for a solution that will greatly help improve productivity for customers and suppliers alike.  I don’t have statistics on how many new standards are ultimately successful.  That would be some interesting data.

I do know that not every standard that starts becomes completed and adopted.  Completion – the official ratification by an organization or managing entity – is important, of course.  Yet it’s adoption that indicates the true measure of success for a standard.  The number of customers using it and the number of tools that support it are the best indicators of a viable standard.

There are dozens of EDA standards sitting on the shelf unused.  (Remember VHDL Waves?)  Resources consumed by these standards could certainly have been better spent. Working on a standard that isn’t going anywhere is a senseless waste.  If there is a well-adopted standard that is available to everyone, it is not effective to create a competing or overlapping one.

Hence, my 3^rd Commandment for Effective Standards is: Know when to stop.

No one likes to admit defeat, but shutting down an ineffective standards activity is only right.  If an already-accepted standard is made available to everyone, it’s important to stop working on an alternative. 

The EDA industry has done this at least three times in standards for libraries, constraint languages, and physical description languages. Let’s hope this commandment continues to be honored for many years to come.

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