Reflections from the Director’s Desk
By Paul Trio, Director, Standards
To our esteemed Program Members – As some of you have already heard, I was appointed earlier this year to lead our SEMI International Standards Program. To those whom I have had the pleasure of working with during my first 12 years at SEMI, I am excited to once again be working with you, learning from you, and supporting you. To those whom I haven’t met yet, I look forward to meeting you in our upcoming events.
While in my many ways, it feels like coming back home, I take these reins with deep respect and humility. Through your dedication and leadership, we have accomplished a lot these past 50 years. From our ‘humble beginnings’ with wafer specifications to our recent global cybersecurity initiatives, our Program has been tirelessly serving the microelectronics industry. And as we look towards the next 50 years, we at SEMI will ensure that the Program is ready to take on new standardization fronts.
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Tim Turley who recently came onboard as our Sr. Manager, Standards Business Development. As most of you have come to know, we at SEMI Standards wear many hats and Tim will be no different. Among them, he will be providing oversight to our HQ operations and will work alongside me in developing global strategies for the Program.
Before joining SEMI, Tim provided consulting services to technology firms in Silicon Valley in the semiconductor, electronic, biotech, medical device and solar sectors, providing start-up services such as product definition, marketing strategy, and valuation.
Prior to that, Tim worked at a large semiconductor firm, delivering Wi-Fi chipsets and WLAN modules to major PC vendors. He has also participated in standards development efforts for ISO XML, SNMP network management, and Bluetooth wireless technologies.
In preparation for our inaugural Standards Watch editorship, I sat down with Tim to get his perspective on standards and what some learnings we can apply to ensure both current and future activities are as successful and impactful as possible.
[PT] Again, welcome aboard, Tim! Given your previous roles, what has your experience been on standardization?
[TT] As a new member of the SEMI organization, I thought I would share some thoughts about my experiences working with Standards in previous roles and how they played out in the marketplace.
[PT] Which effort in the networking/communications space sticks out for you the most?
[TT] As the Internet was growing, the need to manage TCP/IP networks led to the emergence of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which was designed to manage network devices such as routers and bridges.
At the time, I was working for an engineering consulting firm, MITRE, to implement a network management system (NMS) the German air traffic control agency, the Deutsche Flugsicherung. In writing the NMS specification for vendor bids, being able to cite an industry standard like SNMP allowed us to accelerate the bidding process and evaluate commercially available SNMP solutions.
Interestingly, SNMP was developed outside of a formal standards body, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which used working groups to develop rough consensus on so-called RFCs (Requests for Comments), rather than formal voting procedures. This accelerated the adoption of the SNMP standard by vendors and consumers, and accelerated time-to-market and ease-of-implementation for users.
[PT] We have seen activities driven by customers pushing for a standardized implementation. Similarly, we have seen cases where stakeholders come together trying to address interoperability among existing implementations. Any experience or insight you can share?
[TT] Yes, working in the Bluetooth semiconductor sector, I witnessed how Bluetooth emerged in a few short years to become a ubiquitous standard for short-range wireless communications. It was developed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) represented by industry sector working groups that defined specific use cases for the technology applications for headset audio, automotive, and other consumer applications.
The key for Bluetooth to be successful was interoperability among devices and ease-of-use for consumers, along with a strong certification program to ensure interoperability among Bluetooth devices from different vendors.
The Bluetooth SIG successfully drove consensus for the basic communication protocol, and managed successive revisions that expanded its realm into other markets, such as the sensor and IoT (Internet of Things) markets.
Key point: The Bluetooth SIG working groups helped guide the development of Bluetooth to support real-world applications and while keeping backward compatibility and interoperability with previous versions to make it extremely successful in the marketplace.
[PT] In closing, have you noticed any recent trends in Standards that may come into play with SEMI in the future.
[TT] Yes, early in my career while at Lotus I was involved with the ISO standards development for XML (extensible markup language) and recently have learned of ISO’s efforts to standardize document formats for Standards developed by SDOs.
This group, the National Information Standards Organization, NISO, has defined so called, “document-type definitions” (DTDs) using XML to establish common formats for Standards documents.
One advantage is it allows content creators to author documents without concern for formatting, and style rules applied by XML can then be converted to PDF files for publishing.
Another benefit of XML is that content becomes semantically tagged allowing interlinking of references and searchable metadata that can be indexed using Internet search tools, increasing the visibility of documents.
The work by NISO is backed by over 200 members as the SDO industry transitions to standardizing document types for Standards.
SEMICON West 2022 is just around the corner. Tim and I look forward to seeing you at our meetings! Please stop by and say hello. Coffee is on us!
Standards Watch
SEMI
www.semi.org
June 15, 2022