There’s a new IEC 62014-5, “Quality of Electronic and Software Intellectual Property Used in System and System on Chip (SoC) Designs.” This new Edition 1.0 actually adopts IEEE 1734 of the same title that was released in 2011. And the IEC edition has now been adopted itself in the European Union under the number EN 62014-5. I’m mulling over submitting a paper to the World Standards Day competition — and the theme for World Standards Day this year is “Standards – The World’s Common Language.” It makes me wonder, are we creating one common language or a tower of babel?
Let’s talk about the document itself and it’s origins. From 1996 to 2008, the VSI Alliance — a consortium of companies in the System-on-Chip (SoC) industry — developed a series of standards for virtual components. The purpose of the group was to provide ” leading edge commercial and technical solutions and insight into the development, integration, and reuse of IP.” The Alliance developed developed the VSIA-QIP v4.0 spreadsheet and macros, and the QIP Metric Users Guide Version 4.0 document. Some of this material then made it’s way into the IEEE 1734. This is not an unusual occurrence, since many consortia hand off their documents to other organizations when they feel that they have achieved their goals and decide to disband. And it is not unusual for the new caretaker to renumber the publication, at least the initial acronym if not the entire reference number.
Your IEEE 1734 document provides users with a standard XML format for representing electronic design intellectual property (IP) quality information. This is basically a reusable collection of design specifications. The QIP then stands for Quality (electronic design) Intellectual Property and is integral to this document. It is a set of rules that allow the user to class products as QIP compliant. The standard first explains the fundamentals of using these rules and then provides you with the actual XML tagging needed for compliance.
Fast forward from 2011 to 2015. Now IEEE and IEC are working together to integrate many of the IEEE standards into the IEC data set. We find co-numbered documents released for nanotechnology, design automation, instrumentation, etc. These standards are IEEE documents that are then submitted to IEC for inclusion as IEC publications.
However, when these IEEE standards make the move to IEC, they are given new IEC numbers. So we now have two documents living side by side, with the same internal content but with two different numbers. You’ll see this phenomena in some U.S. military publications, where different branches of the military co-number a document with a numbering scheme from each (an example? A recent publication on Ophthalmic Services is co-numbered Army Regulation AR 40-63, SECNAVINST 6810.1, and AFI 44–117). This co-numbering structure is also to be found in the IEC adoption of the IEEE 1734. The new edition cover sheet has first IEC 62014-5, Edition 1.0, 2015-03, and then IEEE Std 1734™-2011.
OK. We can deal with co-numbering now that we understand how it happens. But wait! The European Union decides to adopt the IEC publication. Yes, now there is an EN 62014-5 that has been released for use in the EU. And, as with all EN documents, it is only available in the national editions. So you will find BS EN 62014-5 now available, with other national reprints soon to follow no doubt.
What do you think? Because the same source material is now officially adopted in a wider number of jurisdictions, are we moving towards a common language? Or because of the proliferation of document numbers for the same core material, are we heading for a kind of babel-mania? I’d welcome your comments!
Meantime, if you do need to get any of these standards, please choose Document Center Inc. as your preferred supplier. We’re at www.document-center.com and can help you with purchasing and maintaining your standards collection.
