Internet is the Answer

Electronic News,  Nov 13, 2000  by Steve Smith

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Web may hold key to today's electronic design dilemmas

In the past few years, the Internet has become the driving force behind a rapidly growing new economy.

The Internet's broad impact is being experienced by every industry it touches. Wide-ranging benefits are being achieved via the Internet's ability to eliminate geographic barriers and increase the efficiency of entire business processes.

As a result, innovative forms of collaboration and partnering are being created that increase productivity and reduce costs. Behind the scene lies a massive technology infrastructure that feeds on its own progress, driving insatiable demands for faster networking equipment, compute servers and Internet-access devices.

The basic engines behind all of these technologically advanced products are electronic chips molded into complex ASICs and systems-on-a-chip (SOCs). These fuel the Internet as well, making it both the driver and receiver of technological advances. Interestingly enough, the Internet may well be the way to solve many of the design problems that are caused by rapidly advancing technology.

Resources Are Scarce

The advances in silicon technology are enabling engineers to build chips that are ultradense and contain an amazing amount of functionality. The complexity of these chips requires the use of experienced design engineers and building a design environment capable of supporting their efforts. Hiring and retaining sufficient engineering talent is one of the biggest challenges facing many start-ups and fast-growth companies. Some companies are solving this issue by hiring staff in locations across the globe and enabling them to work remotely from the main design center.

In addition, the shortage of IT and system administration staff causes some companies to rely on their engineers to install and maintain compute servers and design tools themselves. Executives at these companies however, would prefer that these engineers focus on their core competency instead-designing the next-generation product.

Because time-to-market pressure is driving ever shorter design cycles, companies are enlisting the services of intellectual property (IP) vendors and turnkey design houses as well as entering partnerships with other companies to reduce the time required to design complex SOCs. Though leveraging existing IP eases the burden on a company's design resources, this model brings its own complications. Complex interfaces between IP blocks and custom circuits may require close collaboration with the vendor or partner to debug problems.

The Answer, the Internet

Taken together, all of these issues seem insurmountable. Fortunately, a mechanism exists that can alleviate these problems across both distance and time. That resource is the Internet. The very mechanism that is driving the demand for high-performance technology is the one that can most easily be enlisted to ease the burdens that advancing technology causes.

The same power and speed that Internet users invoke every day can be leveraged by design engineers. Companies can outsource the hosting and management of their design environment to focus their valuable resources on core design activities. Access to highly secure, reliable computing resources via the Internet is possible today due to the convergence of several technologies. The abundance of high-bandwidth Internet access, thin-client technology, and scalable, centralized compute resources provide the capability to deliver a complete hosted design environment (HDE). The HDE vendor supplies everything required to host a company's EDA and related development tools, including related IT and system administration support-all accessed from an engineer's desktop via a standard browser. This isn't a vision of the distant future-all of this is possible with the technology that exists today.

The Internet also allows geographically dispersed engineering talent to work from anywhere, at any time. Hosting the design environment on the Internet allows engineers to collaborate by using desktop-sharing software, enabling common viewing of one colleague's computer screen on another, via the Internet, coupled with common access to design data and tools. All of this technology is available today for companies that are willing to embrace a new way of procuring and using design resources.

Where We Are

The hosted design environment directly reduces the large up-front staff and capital investments otherwise required to build one's own design environment. This is possible because a single hosting vendor responsible for many design environments can amortize the cost of building infrastructure and support services across multiple customers, thus gaining economies of scale. In addition, by accessing a ready-built design environment, companies can start a project weeks earlier, enabling design completion ahead of schedule with lower risk. The HDE model can also offer greater flexibility because it optimizes the availability of design resources, including those required during critical verification tasks, to ramp up and scale down depending on the requirements of a particular project phase.