Pay-per-use EDA tools coming to the Web
By Peter Clarke LAS VEGAS — The possibility that engineers could use remote tools as part of a complete electronic design flow over the Internet moved closer to reality here last week at the Design Automation Conference.

A group of graduate students led by professor Richard Newton of the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated a collection of EDA software tools, including Synopsys Inc.’s Design Compiler, that could be used to design ICs over the World Wide Web.

The tool set is currently limited to realizing finite state machines (FSMs), and the research at this point remains an academic exercise. But the principle is clear: With tools running on powerful hosts — perhaps at vendor sites — and with adequate bandwidth, the World Wide Web could transform design by ushering in an era of pay-per-use EDA tools accessed over the Internet.

“My vision is that five or seven years from now, somebody in Japan with a Netscape browser could use Synopsys’s tools or Viewlogic’s tools, university research and [format] translation servers on the Web. The challenge is to make the whole thing work.”

Visit the Berkeley team’s home page at http://www.cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/