Index


Information about standards

    General standards information

    Standards play an important role in electrical and electronics engineering. Most engineers must adhere to standards while designing products and systems. In their daily work, engineers deal with official, industry, and de facto standards. Standards contribute to lowering product-development costs by letting you use off-the-shelf parts and reuse designs. The industry develops many standards to increase your ability to interface portions of systems with each other, such as, for example, a CPU accessing memory, a number of pc boards interfacing within a system, or two systems that can communicate independently of their manufacturing originIn electronics, design standards cover physical-hardware characteristics and timing, the syntax and semantics of system-to-system communication (called protocols), and the types of tools you use in designing the system. The IEEE and the EIA are the best-known standards-making organizations in the electrical and electronics fields. There are different kind of standards:

    • Official standard: When an officially recognized standards-making organization successfully ballots a candidate document, it becomes an official standard.
    • Industry standard: If an industry consortium develops a standard, the published document becomes an industry standard.
    • De facto standard: When the industry widely accepts and uses a method, a tool, a hardware implementation, or a protocol, it becomes a de facto standard.
    The status of standard can change ofer years. Sometimes, a company or an organization submits an industry or de facto standard to an official standards-making organization. The organization makes necessary modifications, and the standard then becomes an official standard. Official standards-making organizations are international organizations, national organizations, and industry consortia. National organizations, such as the IEEE and the EIA in the United States, develop their own standards and frequently submit them for international adoption. Some standardization organizations almost never develop their own standards, but just ballots candidate documents. Most engineers must adhere to standards while designing products and systems, but relatively few engineers are involved in developing them. A few standards-making organizations allow individual membership, but most allow only corporate membership.


<[email protected]>

Back to ePanorama main page ??