Every year at about this time, the electronic design automation (EDA) Industry takes stock of itself. With the Design Automation Conference (DAC) just around the corner it's easy to understand why. For many, the success or failure of their company rests solely on whether or not they can have their product ready for introduction at or around the June show. What's hot and what's not seems to be the prevailing focus of most designers, me included.
What exactly are the main trends you, as a designer, should be aware of these days? Furthermore, what new products should you have on your radar screen?
In today's fast-paced, dynamic electronics industry, getting products to market on time has become quite a daunting task. Competition is fierce and growing stronger by the minute. Many view the Internet as the next frontier for designers. This is because it offers the flexibility and access to communication channels that will be necessary for survival in the coming years.
Until now, most of the movement onto the Internet has come from printed-circuit board (pc-board) vendors. The wide array of available products range from design services and component information retrieval services, to actual products that allow design via the web. To their credit, many of these vendors have pioneered the pay-per-use and monthly fee-based business models. By lowering the cost of entry, they have swung open the doors to a whole new segment of potential tool users.
Despite the efforts underway on the pc-board side of the design industry, IC vendors are no slackers. Though slower to the starting gate, their announcements as of late have been nonetheless significant.
For proof of this, you need to look no further than Cadence Design Systems. The company announced both a strategic initiative to support Internet-based electronics design, and a partnership with Hewlett-Packard and Flextronics International, culminating in the formation of a company called SpinCircuit Inc.
Internet-Enabled Initiative
The initiative, iCadence, is intended to promote Internet-enabled design through infrastructure and content. This infrastructure will be able to bridge the gap between the supply chain and the EDA industry. Supported by this infrastructure, the content will feature a variety of tools and services, as well as portals such as www.SPECCTRA.com and www.Pspice.com. Both of these engineering communities will offer a variety of resources comprising educational forums, chat groups, product news, press releases, newsletters, contests, and beta-site application forms. User success stories and application notes will be included, too, along with software downloads, updates, patches, and free evaluation copies.
SpinCircuit will leverage the Internet as a means of bringing the electronics supply-chain network to the design desktop. Through its gateway, www.spincircuit.com, OEMs and engineers will be able to access the information they need to make design decisions early in the design process. This information will be available through a taxonomy-based component browser. It will contain an online database of design information featuring approximately two million parts (Fig. 1). An additional 250,000 parts will be added to the database each month. The company is currently working to establish universal standards for schematic-capture symbols and component taxonomies.
Toolwire hopes to mark out its ground as an Internet-based application service provider (ASP). Through partnerships with companies like Sun Microsystems, Lucent Technologies, Synopsys, and Avnet, it delivers software design tools, hardware servers, and virtually unlimited access to high-performance computing resources. All of this is available to designers on a 24-hour basis, regardless of their location.
Partnering with Hewlett-Packard Co., Monterey Design Systems has staked its claim to the Internet. The company's e-services offering includes remote access to both software and hardware through secured, high-bandwidth Internet and intranet connections to worldwide data centers. The current web-based design tools include E-Sonar, a front-end physical prototyping tool, and E-Dolphin, a physical design solution. Each may be purchased from Monterey's portal site on a global access, design portal, or time-based design business model basis. The result is access to global design on a 24 hour, seven-day-a-week basis.
Another occurrence of Internet partnering comes from Electronics Workbench. By collaborating with PartMiner Inc., the company now offers pc-board and PLD designers the ability to search for, identify, source, and purchase more than 10 million electronic components over the Internet (Fig. 2). This capability is available to users of the Multisim schematic and simulation tool. Access is provided to the PartMiner CAPSXpert electronic component database.
Novas Software Inc.'s latest offering, nEwhere, is guaranteed by the company to improve your productivity. It's 100% free and will work with any application (Fig. 3). This product enables design teams to work together, using Internet and intranet connections. Designed to promote team communication between designers of ICs, system-on-a-chip (SoC) ICs, and electronic systems, it allows online sharing of information. In other words, designers can see what their team members are doing and collaborate online to solve problems or debug a design.