Internet and Intranet Services for Electronic Design

Background

There has been renewed interest and new attempts are underway to utilize the Internet for the design of integrated circuits and electronic products. Dr. Richard Newton, UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Chair, has been a proponent of leveraging the power of the Internet for electronic design for several years. A number of commercial products and services, which will test the viability of applying the power of the Internet, are now becoming available.

In this article we describe some of these new products and services and comment on the strengths and weaknesses that we can observe.

eCommerce

ChipCenter's web site offers electronic component commerce that allows design engineers and purchasing personnel access to distributor electronic product data. Design engineers can find catalog type listings of electronic components from leading industry sources. Purchasing agents, and likely some engineers, will be able to place orders for the needed components.

At this writing, companies such as Intel Corporation and Compaq Corporation have reported that Internet based business transactions are representing a major share of their sales revenue. Intel now has it's mind set on owning and operating Internet based data centers from which it can sell computer services thereby expanding into e-commerce services.

It has taken the banking industry more than 20 years, since the service infrastructure became available, to reach a point that personal finance transactions have become main stream. Account information services and money transactions within the Intranet of the financial industry precede many years of personal finance transactions. Security controls and transmission reliability have advanced to gain the confidence of financial institutions and their customers. In contrast, electronic commerce over the Internet has mushroomed over the last two years.

Electronic Design and Design Services via the Internet and Intranets

As with early banking transactions, chip data sets have been transmitted via Intranets to and from customers and suppliers. The owner of the Intranet servers controlled security and gave access on a case by case basis to customers and suppliers. Extending the use of the Internet to the electronic design process outside of an Intranet is now at a pivotal phase. Certainly the basic communications infrastructure is available. The financial industry and companies utilizing the Internet for electronic commerce have proven that security and reliable transaction processing is dependable. Are we ready to move to product design over the Internet?

New electronic design related applications that are about to become available are for technical and management collaboration. While tools for collaboration are quite prevalent and used over the Internet and Intranets alike, Genedax is working with Microsoft to provide design related collaboration with Microsoft's Explorer version 5 and new Genedax software.

Cadence with it new acquisition of the OrCAD company will be offering a component information system with marketing messages and parts ordering facilities called Active Parts. You have free use of OrCAD's eCapture product to help flag the OrCAD database with your design intent for specific components and you have the ability to pop into your schematic your chosen components.

In that chip design engineers are developing products primarily on UNIX based workstations and servers, Genedax will be under pressure to offer their products on UNIX and Linux to reach a broader market. For the component information systems services of CMP Media and Cadence/OrCAD the critical factor will be whether the component databases are well maintained and updated with new component data. Unreliability of data will quickly discourage users. The incentive for maintaining and providing accurate data is present in that the services are being counted upon to generate revenue for the suppliers.

Design engineers have told me that their company policy would not permit transmission of the company's proprietary design database to a public Internet site, or even a vendor's "secure" site for EDA tool application processing. Now Avant! has begun to offer session based licensing of the Nova-Verilint checker. With a credit card or a purchase order account, a customer may purchase tokens each good for one session of use. In this way Avant! is bringing to the design engineer access to its products via an Internet site.

We can expect many more novel applications to be offered in the near future, particularly if those described do meet user's expectations and result in good businesses for the companies providing the products and services.

URLs for this article:

Chipcenter

Cadence/OrCAD

Genedax

Avant!

Copyright Summit Innovation Inc, July 1999

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