As the year draws to a close, I want to wish all of you the very best during the holiday season. Let’s hope for a bright 2009.

Take care, everyone -
Karen

Standards and patents are a flammable combination, IMHO.  Let me give you the latest example from my realm.  SystemVerilog, aka IEEE 1800, is an EDA industry standard language for hardware description and verification.  The IEEE P1800 working group is finishing up the next version of the standard, hoping to begin the balloting process in the next couple of months. 

Recently, one of the entity (corporate) members of the P1800 working group made an interesting announcement.  Mentor Graphics said they hold patent claims that are essential for implementing the upcoming version of SystemVerilog.  Even more interesting is that they said they will *not* license these patents. 

If both of these statements are true - and I do not know if they are - the implication is that anyone who implements the upcoming version of SystemVerilog is open to patent infringement claims by Mentor Graphics. 

You can imagine that the P1800 working group participants are contemplating what to do next.  There are many questions coming and decisions to be made.  2009 is sure to start off with intrigue in The Standards Game.  I wish all of my readers a wonderful holiday season.

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I’m intrigued by the latest step forward by the IEEE Standards Association: they are jumping into the pool - the patent pool, that is.  Through a collaborative effort with Via Licensing Corporation, the IEEE-SA will cultivate patent cross-licensing.  The goal is to increase adoption of IEEE standards, and technologies that employ the standards, by reducing legal hurdles imposed by patents. 

The concept of a patent pool is two or more companies agree to cross-license their patents that are related to a specific technology.  According to Wikipedia, one of the first patent pools was formed in 1856 which promoted mass production of sewing machines.  Related to a standard, a patent pool is formed of “essential patents” which are those patents that would have to be infringed upon in order to implement the standard. 

While a patent pool doesn’t solve every standard-patent issue, it can mitigate situations where companies desire to retain their patent rights while developing industry standards.  With a patent pool in place for a standard, streamlined processes expedite fair licensing, IP rights are preserved for patent holders, consumers of the standard have reduced risk of lawsuits, and legal barriers to adoption of the standard are significantly lower.

All this assumes that the patent holder is willing to license its patent, of course.  If not, I believe the patent holder should follow the 2nd Commandment for Effective Standards: Do Not Mix Patents and Standards.  There are at least a couple of ongoing legal battles over participation in standards committees by patent holders that lead me to say this.  They are the famous (or infamous) Broadcom/Qualcomm (with both sides claiming victory earlier this month) and Rambus (which could end up in the Supreme Court of the United States), both of which bring to question whether a patent holder can retain its IP rights while participating in the development of a standard which cannot be implemented without necessarily infringing on its patent.  Had patent pools been created in these two cases, perhaps the question would have been answered affirmatively.

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Hello to my readers while I’m participating in the IEEE Standards Association meeting series in Florida (not a hardship since the weather is beautiful here and it’s snowing in Colorado).  In conjunction with the meetings, the IEEE-SA held its annual awards ceremony which was an enjoyable and festive event.  The IEEE-SA bestowed several prestigious awards to individuals and a corporation that have made significant contributions towards standards in the electrical and electronic engineering realm.  This year, the recipient of the corporate award was…

… Mentor Graphics.  (Did you think I was going to say something different?)

The IEEE-SA corporate award is given each year to an entity member of the IEEE-SA for leadership and contributions that promote the IEEE-SA’s mission.  Past recipients are Intel, Motorola, HP, Sony, Lucent – Bell Labs, and IBM.  This year’s citation recognizes Mentor’s “visionary leadership in bringing greater efficiency to the standards development process in the Design Automation Standards Committee [DASC] through the adoption and support of the entity based development model”. 

I’m glad to write about this well-deserved award for Mentor, which I feel was given largely due to the efforts of my counterpart at Mentor.  (If you don’t know who he is and would like me to reveal his identity, just let me know and I’ll ask his permission.  He’s not shy, so I think he’d be amenable.)  His efforts towards reconstructing the DASC and promoting the IEEE-SA corporate standards program are noteworthy. 

In the spirit of industry cooperation towards continuous improvement of EDA standards, I send my congratulations to Mentor Graphics.

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