The Qi standard is a document that describes how to design power transmitters and power receivers. It is a rather complicated text, more abstract than your typical product design documentation. It is more abstract because an interoperability standard tries to maximize the design freedom for product developers. Not everything is fixed and that can make it difficult to understand.

Our goal is interoperability. A power receiver must work with all power transmitters. Interoperability follows automatically when the product developer follows the instructions in the standard. Right? Well, … that is the theory. In practice it does not work like that.

Even a properly reviewed specification can be ambigeous. Product developers can interpret a text in ways the editor never considered. And product developers can make mistakes. The result is a product that might not work with other products.

Publishing the documentation of a standard is not enough. To achieve our goal we also need:

• A set of test procedures that help developers to determine whether the product works correctly.
• A trademarked logo and a trademark license agreement to limit the use of the logo to products that work together.
• Certification by an independent test lab before products are allowed to carry the logo.

The test procedures must cover all aspects of the standard. Everything that could possibly go wrong must be verified. It is interesting to note that, for standards like Qi, the documentation of the test procedures has more pages than the standard itself!

Our customers will see the Qi logo and know: this product works with my other Qi products. That promise holds if the logo is used on properly tested products. No Qi logo on products that don’t work! To protect Qi’s promise, the logo is trademarked and you need a license to use the logo. That license makes the use of the logo dependent on certification by an independent test lab.

Publishing a standard is not enough. Without test documentation, certification services, and a logo license agreement, interoperability is an illusion.

This entry was posted by Menno Treffers on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Logo, Specification, Standardization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.