Sounds pretty good, huh? But I bet you're wondering just how these virtual design teams will be formed. Consider for a moment that the electronic-design industry is perhaps the most global market in the world. Together with the recent flurry of mergers and acquisitions, this fact demands an integration of design teams in different, perhaps geographically disperse, locations.
On top of that, the traditional workplace is disappearing in the high-tech sector. Today, many people either work from home or set their own hours. The traditional view of a design team huddled around a schematic or circuit board is being challenged.
Soon, designers and engineers will increasingly find themselves collaborating with colleagues in remote locations. They'll have no other choice. Because of increased chip complexity, project teams will get larger and multidisciplined. Companies will be forced to seek out and work with the best talent, regardless of where it's located. Assuming not everyone will want to relocate, the result will be a design team scattered around the country, and perhaps even the world, along with a project that can literally be worked on 24 hours a day (Fig. 1).
These virtual design teams may include customers, internal resources, and external resources (such as third-party core providers), all working together as a cohesive unit in one seamless project environment (Fig. 2). The internal resources will focus exclusively on areas of core competence and competitive differentiation. The external design resources will primarily offer services or design capability in specific areas of expertise on a project-by-project basis. Outsourcing of tools and manpower will become much more commonplace.
With its flexibility, established infrastructure, and low-cost audio and video communication capability, the Internet offers the ideal place to host these virtual teams. Its ability to connect geographically dispersed people is in direct support of the newly emerging "design anywhere, anytime" mentality. The benefits are obvious: enhanced collaboration and data-sharing capabilities, faster data communications and management, etc.
Of course, with the Internet comes concern about ease of communication, performance, and security. For the most part, these issues can and will be addressed by tool vendors. As new technology becomes available to Internet users, vendors will definitely find a way to leverage these advances for the benefit of designers.
If At First You Do Succeed, Try Not To Look Astonished
Despite these concerns, it doesn't seem like the design community will offer much resistance to the idea of an Internet-based design environment. For the most part, designers and engineers who use EDA tools are technically literate and already have access to the Internet. They also probably have the computer power and high-speed connections necessary to efficiently communicate large volumes of information. Designs created using EDA tools already exist in an electronic format, so no problem exists in digitizing design details for use on the Internet.
Of course, this futuristic scenario of a virtual design environment wouldn't be complete without a new class of tightly coupled, Internet-enabled EDA, project-management, and team productivity tools. Rather than just pass data back and forth, these Internet-specific tools will facilitate and capture communication in a controlled and organized manner. All communication will be indexed and retrievable for future use.
The tools will be based on a methodology that encompasses a block-based design approach and some version of prototyping, whether virtual or reconfigurable. They'll operate from a high-integrity, standard database that can constantly update and synchronize data across all design sites. It doesn't matter if a site is down the hall or on the other side of the world. All electronic data passed must be actionable by all team members and allow constraints to be passed to every design team working on a project. As a result, concurrent design, analysis, and optimization will be possible among different design disciplines.
The need to share and reuse design information, such as software, models, test benches, and expertise, will force EDA vendors to create open, standards-based tool flows and standard languages. No longer will the walls exist between traditionally separate design functions. Designers will find a way to communicate, either by speaking the same language or using a specification and partitioning process that's so rigorous and exact they're no longer required to talk.
This isn't an easy task, considering different design disciplines speak radically different languages. Even when designers use the same words, they often have different meanings. And they usually use different levels of abstraction. As standards-based tools enable teams to work together, how will designers find a way to speak the same language? Will they even need to do so?
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