Standards Week

STANDARDS WEEK

Join us for Standards Week at the EMC Symposium in Grand Rapids! This is one of the best places to be able to learn about and get involved in the standards that will shape your products and industry. Working Groups drafting standards for the IEEE will be meeting during this week, and those meetings are open to all. There will be a workshop/tutorial session covering news on standards around the world, such as CISPR, IEC, and EU Directives. If there's an area where you think standardization could be beneficial across the community, come learn about how to kickstart a standard from a blank page. We welcome involvement by people at all stages of their careers, from just starting out and learning the ropes to those who know every trick in the book. 

This year’s Standards Week program continues to offer many opportunities to learn about or engage in Standards activities of the IEEE EMC Society. Standards Week will offer a wide range of technical papers, tutorials, workshops, and meetings that are related to or focused on standards. While attending papers, tutorials, and workshops requires a Symposium registration, please note that all Standards meetings are open to all who would like to attend. Standards meetings include the SACCom, SDECom, Working Group, Continuity Group, and standards Updates. No registration fee or membership is required to attend, only your interest in Standards. Please drop by the registration desk for a free pass and join us.

Standards impact much of what we do in the EMC world. Whether designing for EMC, testing for EMC, operating an accredited EMC laboratory, making EMC-related measurements, manufacturing EMC components, documenting EMC performance, developing EMC simulation models, creating simulation tools, or most anything else, standards are there to promote consistency and document best practice. No matter if you are interested in education, developing a new standard, or changing an existing standard, we invite you to enjoy the program and engage with us. 

To that end - while at the Symposium, be on the lookout for attendees with a “Standards” ribbon on their badge. These are people already involved in Standards activities and probably a member of one of one of our major Committees – SACCom and SDECom. Be sure to strike up a conversation with one of these new or old hands at Standards and see what Standards development and education has to offer you.

You will also find the IEEE EMC Society and others, such as the ASC C63 EMC committee and various accrediting organizations, staffing booths in the exhibit hall, ready to meet you, answer questions you may have, and to talk about Standards and their impact. 

Standards Week kicks off on Monday morning, bright and early. First up is the meeting of the Standards Advisory and Coordination Committee (SACCom), which establishes and maintains representatives to various non-IEEE Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) that provide the EMC Society with up-to-the-minute information on standardization work you may not hear about elsewhere. SACCom is also a gathering place where the representatives get an opportunity to meet with each other and talk about standards with their peers in other SDOs. After the morning break, we will continue with the meeting of the Standards Development and Education Committee (SDECom), which sponsors EMC Society standards. SDECom reviews the standards under development, monitors progress, and discusses what new standardization work may be needed. SDECom meets again on Thursday to review progress made at the Symposium.

Throughout the week you will also find many other opportunities for standards-related learning and participation. Many workshops and tutorials on Monday and Friday offer unique and focused topics that are driven by Standards. Wednesday through Thursday you will find various Standards meetings including Working Groups, Continuity Groups and Updates. Working Group meetings can range from individuals doing actual work on standards to mini-tutorials on what the IEEE EMC standard contains.  Standards Continuity Group meetings are our mechanism to preserve knowledge between standards development activities and provide a forum for reviewing and proposing new work. Updates will provide you with the latest on the topic Standard. 

A summary of the planned Standards Week activities is provided in the following table. Additional Working Group or Continuity Group meetings may be scheduled. 

The project descriptions for Working Groups planning to meet at the Symposium are noted below. Additional information on these projects can be found at the website of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) located at https://standards.ieee.org/standard/. The Project Authorization Request (PAR) Approval link on each project page will take you to the project’s PAR, which provides the project’s purpose, leadership, and other useful information. 

And last but certainly not least, you may not be familiar with the I/O Buffer Info Specification (IBIS) Summit planned for Friday morning. The IBIS Summit is a meeting of the IBIS Open Form, which develops and maintains standards for electronic behavioral specifications of integrated circuit input/output analog characteristics including IBIS, IBIS-AMI, IBIS-ISS, ICM, and Touchstone. These standards enable a method for sharing integrated circuit I/O models between silicon vendors, simulation software vendors, and end customers. These models are key for efficient and accurate modeling of EMI and SIPI performance. While attending the IBIS Summit is free of charge, pre-registration is required. For the registration contact, please refer to the IBIS Summit details in this program or the IBIS events page at https://ibis.org/events/.