On the 1st of February we caught up with Karen Bartleson, the 2016 President Elect of IEEE at the at ISSCC 2016 in San Francisco. Karen was kind enough to talk to us about her work with IEEE standards which is a fascinating and very important element of technology. For most of our audience this may be the first time that you are exposed to the complexities of IEEE standards so please listed to the audio interview below. Karen has also provided a welcome message in video format which you can watch below.
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About Karen:
Karen Bartleson has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, specifically in electronic design automation. She is currently senior director of corporate programs and initiatives at Synopsys, an electronic design automation company, in Mountain View CA USA. Her responsibilities include creating programs for technical standards development, software tool interoperability, strong relationships with universities and research institutions worldwide, compute platform product support, and customer engagement through social media. She joined Synopsys in 1995 as manager of its standards group, and later was director of quality from 2000-2002. Since 2003, her duties at Synopsys have increased widely, contributing to the company’s innovation and success. She currently represents Synopsys on the Silicon Integration Initiative’s Board of Directors and from 2000-2009 was an officer of the Board of Directors of Accellera, which creates, supports, promotes, and advances system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry.
Prior to Synopsys, Ms. Bartleson was CAD manager at UTMC (United Technologies Microelectronics Center), responsible for the design system used to create high-reliability application-specific integrated circuits. Before that, she worked at Texas Instruments as logic analysis manager, responsible for development and support of TI’s internal logic simulation products.
Ms. Bartleson was President of the IEEE Standards Association in 2013 and 2014. As President, she led the development of a new strategic plan, furthered the principles of the OpenStand market-driven standardization paradigm, and finalized IEEE’s membership in the Global Standards Collaboration. As a member of the IEEE Board of Directors in 2013 and 2014, she chaired and led the development of the strategic plan for the IEEE Internet Initiative committee, whose charter is to raise IEEE’s influence and profile in the areas of Internet governance, cyber-security, and cyber-privacy policy development. She was also a member of the IEEE strategy committee, overseeing the development of the role of IEEE in global public policy.
She has published numerous articles about standards and universities. She is the author of the book, The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards: Practical Insights for Creating Technical Standards, [Synopsys Press, 2010] and the blog, “The Standards Game”. In 2003, she received the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Automation Achievement Award at the 40th Design Automation Conference. Ms. Bartleson earned a B.S. in Engineering Science with a concentration in Electronic Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo CA USA, in 1980.
Interview conducted by IMPACT Editor in Chief, Eddie Custovic