IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) and TRON Forum Sign Agreement to Advance IoT Development and Interoperability

PISCATAWAY, NJ, 10 November 2017 – IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA), today announced the signing of an agreement with the TRON Forum, a forum that supports a development project called TRON Project that addresses real-time architecture for embedded systems. The agreement transfers ownership of the TRON µT-Kernel 2.0 to IEEE SA and provides a license to TRON Forum for use of the intellectual property. The signing of this agreement is anticipated to greatly expand development and global utilization of the specification already sourced by more than 12,000 licensed IoT manufacturers and others worldwide.

“In our ongoing efforts to foster openness and the broad utilization of globally-recognized technical standards, the IEEE SA continues to seek collaborative agreements that help advance technology for humanity,” said Konstantinos Karachalios, managing director for the IEEE SA. “This agreement with the TRON Forum will pave the way for development of new standards in line with the goal of both our organizations to promote open innovation frameworks. We look forward to our continued work and cooperation.”

The TRON Project is a project launched in 1984 by Prof. Ken Sakamura, now dean of the Faculty of Information Networking for Innovation and Design(INIAD) at Toyo University. The Project aims to build an open architecture for embedded systems. Rather than imposing a closed ecosystem of hardware and software requirements, its founders have defined a set of interfaces that ensure broad interoperability between the various devices supplied by different vendors.

“As part of our efforts to share Japanese technology more broadly on the global stage, the agreement with IEEE SA represents a milestone achievement in furthering the utilization of the µT-Kernel 2.0 specification for IoT applications around the world,” said Prof. Sakamura, the founder of TRON Project. “We look forward to an ongoing collaboration with IEEE SA as we pursue a shared goal to bring benefit to industry and humankind through standardization development based on openness, best practices and assured interoperability for emergent technologies.”

The agreement signed by IEEE and TRON Forum allows the two parties to jointly develop IEEE standards based on the TRON Forum specification.

“The agreement signed with TRON Forum demonstrates how IEEE SA is engaged in new models to accelerate standards development and streamline global distribution to meet the needs of rapidly developing technologies where time to market is imperative,” said Stephen Dukes, Standards Committee, vice chair, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. “Placing the µT-Kernel 2.0 under the auspices of the IEEE SA will make the technology more broadly available for companies and groups looking to an open architecture for developing standards, effectively helping to drive the development of the IoT market through cost reduction and enabling mass deployment.”

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IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) is a collaborative organization where innovators raise the world’s standards for technology. IEEE SA provides a globally open, consensus-building environment and platform that empowers people to work together in the development of leading-edge, market-relevant technology standards, and industry solutions shaping a better, safer and sustainable world. For more information, visit https://standards-qa21.ieee.org.

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