IEEE Standards Association

Each year, the IEEE-SA conducts over 200 standards ballots, a process by which proposed standards are voted upon for technical reliability and soundness. In 2020, IEEE had over 1,200 active standards, with over 650 standards under development.

One of the more notable are the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN group of standards, with the widely used computer networking standards for both wired (ethernet, aka IEEE 802.3) and wireless (IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16) networks, IEEE 1547 Standard for Interconnecting Distributed Resources with Electric Power Systems, and ISO/IEEE 11073 Standards for Health Informatics.

The IEEE standards development process can be broken down into six basic steps:

1. Initiating the Project: An IEEE SA Standards Board approved standards committee must oversee a standard project. The Standards Committee provides oversight for the standard from inception to completion. The standards committees are supported by the technical societies within IEEE. To gain authorization for the standard a Project Authorization Request (PAR) is submitted to the IEEE SA Standards Board. The New Standards Committee (NesCom) of the IEEE SA Standards Board reviews the PAR and makes a recommendation to the Standards Board about whether to approve the PAR.
2. Mobilizing the Working Group: After the PAR is approved, a working group of individuals affected by, or interested in, the standard is organized to develop the standard. IEEE SA rules ensure that all Working Group meetings are open and that anyone has the right to attend and contribute to the meetings.
3. Drafting the Standard: The Working Group prepares a draft of the proposed standard. Generally, the draft follows the IEEE Standards Style Manual that sets guidelines for the clauses and format of the standards document.
4. Balloting the Standard: Once a draft of the standard is finalized in the Working Group, the draft is submitted for Balloting approval. The IEEE Standards Department sends an invitation-to-ballot to any individual who has expressed an interest in the subject matter of the standard. Anyone who responds positively to the invitation-to-ballot becomes a member of the balloting group, as long as the individual is an IEEE Standards Association member or has paid a balloting fee. The IEEE requires that a proposed draft of the standard receive a response rate of 75% (i.e., at least 75% of potential ballots are returned) and that, of the responding ballots, at least 75% approve the proposed draft of the standard. If the standard is not approved, the process returns to the drafting of the standard step in order to modify the standard document to gain approval of the balloting group.
5. Gaining Final Approval: After getting 75% approval, the draft standard, along with the balloting comments, are submitted to the IEEE SA Standards Board Review Committee (RevCom). The RevCom reviews the proposed draft of the standard against the IEEE SA Standards Board Bylaws and the stipulations set forth in the IEEE SA Standards Board Operations Manual. The RevCom then makes a recommendation about whether to approve the submitted draft of the standard document. Each member of the IEEE SA Standards Board places a final vote on the submitted standard document. It takes a majority vote of the Standards Board to gain final approval of the standard.
6. Maintaining the Standard: A standard has a validity period of ten years from the date of IEEE SA Standards Board approval. Amendments that offer minor revisions or extensions to the standard, and corrigenda that makes corrections to the standard can be developed and balloted, but the creation of amendments and corrigenda does not affect the ten-year validity rule. At the end of this period, one of two things has to happen: revision or withdrawal. If no action is taken, the standard will be moved to inactive-reserved status. Sometimes a standard may need a technical or editorial correction to be made. As part of the standards development process, IEEE can accommodate this by issuing a corrigenda or errata Sheet.

Because the IEEE's standards often incorporate technologies that are covered by one or more patent claims, the IEEE-SA has developed and added to its governing bylaws a patent policy to ensure both that the implementers using the standard-essential patented technology in their standard-compliant products have access to that technology and that the patent holders that voluntarily contribute those technologies to the standard receive adequate compensation for the implementers' use.[4][5] An important part of the IEEE patent policy is the FRAND commitment, which is a voluntary contractual commitment signifying that a patent holder with patented technology that has been adopted into one of the IEEE's standards will accept as adequate compensation a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory royalty for third-party use of that technology.[6] Most standard-setting organizations have developed similar patent policies with similar commitments.[7]

In 2014, the IEEE-SA became the center of a large academic debate among economic and legal scholars when it appointed an ad hoc committee to recommend and subsequently draft amendments to the IEEE patent policy, to which the IEEE Board of Governors gave final approval in February 2015 and which went into effect in March 2015.[8] The IEEE said that the reason for the amendments was to increase the clarity of the patent policy and the obligations that the patent policy's FRAND commitment imposes on patent holders seeking to enforce their standard-essential patents.[9] One particularly controversial amendment was a provision that prohibited patent holders from seeking injunctions and exclusion orders (from the ITC) against infringers of standard-essential patents.

The Antitrust Division stated its support for the 2015 patent policy revisions in a business review letter that it issued in January 2015, upon request from the IEEE-SA. In the letter, the Antitrust Division said that the provisions would unambiguously produce net benefits for consumers with insignificant anticompetitive implications.[10] At least one commentator has criticized the Antitrust Division's legal and economic analysis put forth in its business review letter of the revisions, claiming that the Antitrust Division exaggerated the patent policy's procompetitive benefits and wrongly dismissed as unlikely some of its potential anticompetitive costs.[11]

The IEEE Get Program makes some standards publicly available for download: This program grants public access to view and download current individual standards at zero charges. On July 11, 2017, the IEEE Get Program moved to the IEEE Xplore digital library website and standards eligible for the program past that date will only be made available there. On September 1, 2017, the original website was decommissioned and remains, without further updates, to redirect visitors.[12][13][14]