News on standardization in vacuum technology

As everybody knows, the standadisation has a major role to play each time it is necessary to define basis of a technical an,l commercial dialog between economical partners. Moreover, when financial challenges are very high, the need for standardisation is more important than ever. This is what happens for the vacuum industry which is present in a variety of high-tech industries where Such challenges are daily found : like the semiconductor industry for instance. In vacuum science, the international normalisation after having been rather sleeping until 1995 has restarted strongly thanks to the ISO Committee in charge of Vacuum Technology. The First task of this Committee has been to adapt its own organisation in order to best suit technological trends. At the same time, some actions have been done with the aim to update vacuum standards. By being involved in this process, manufacturers and users have to work together in order more effective products to be designed for the most demanding applications. This, with the goal to help everybody understanding better peculiarities of this very specifical discipline : vacuum technology. We will begin by introducing vacuum technology applications and peculiarities : then we will present the background of strategic changes that happened last years in this sector of normalisation. We will also comment reasons of these new strategic orientations.