That's Not Our Job!

摘要

I WAS RECENTLY on a panel which focused on the merger between Accellera and OSCI to form the Accellera Systems Initiative (ASI). During this panel, several fellow panelists and audience members made statements of the type "ASI should figure out how to do xyz", where xyz was the development of some technological advancement needed by the Electronics industry. Now, I am clearly a "standards guy" having been in the thick of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Standards for the last 26 years. However, as much as I want groups like ASI to play an important role in the Electronics ecosystem, I felt compelled to blurt out with regard to each such request "that's not our job!" My response must have been surprising--how could this self-proclaimed standards guy clearly want ASI to play an important role in Standards development, but not want it to tackle the development of important new technologies? The answer lies in my view of the "lagging edge" nature of successful standards. Specifically, I strongly believe that a standard will be the most successful when it is based on one or more technologies that have already had extensive success in the real world, i.e., successful usage in multiple real projects followed by revisions designed to both correct problems and enhance virtues. It is only after such success is achieved that standardization ought to begin.