Tools Bring Design Community to Internet Age

Electronic News, Nov 13, 2000 by Ron Perrotta

Our industry is full of ironies and paradoxes. One that is immediately upon us results from the unbelievable proliferation of communications-related capabilities, applications, devices, and appliances. It seems like every day we hear about a new way to connect to the Internet, whether it is through some super-broadband technology or via wireless protocols, or some combination of both. There is no denying that the connected world is upon us.

As product developers scramble at a breakneck pace to design the chips that drive a plethora of new products that will connect users to the Internet, they highlight the irony that the design process has largely not adopted the Internet technologies that have transformed virtually every other business process. Could it be that in the wired world, the shoemaker's children have no shoes?

It may not be quite that severe, but certainly electronic designers must find new and better ways to leverage the power of the Internet. Just as the Web and connectivity are changing almost every known industry in the world, they too must change how we develop electronic products.

There are some examples of a more pronounced move to e-commerce and Internet-based development in electronics. At this year's Design Automation Conference, the word "portal" was on everyone's lips--although how much substance there is behind this new wave of design dot.coms remains to be seen. And OEM's are embracing more efficient supply chain management, e-commerce and production techniques.

But let's get back to this communications revolution for a moment and look at how the Internet might be able to address a very specific challenge in this space.

In order to develop products that leverage the Internet and provide more and better connectivity, companies need to be able to incorporate an increasing amount of analog and mixed signal content into their products. A growing shortage of skilled analog designers, not to mention the increasing sophistication and "black art" nature of this type of design, puts this analog circuitry on the critical path of virtually all mixed signal design projects.

Ironically, it may be the Internet itself that can help address this. The challenge for design tool vendors is to offer easy-to-use, intuitive and automated capabilities and methodologies that leverage the Internet, thus making analog and mixed signal design more accessible to more designers.

Several companies, including Barcelona Design, are addressing this challenge head-on with a breakthrough technology and market approach. We have pioneered a new approach to analog and mixed signal design that is the technical equivalent of what logic synthesis did for digital design in the 1980s. Without getting into too much technical detail (which is partly the point), suffice to say that our goal is to bring that same level of automation to analog circuit design--to allow designers to go from specs to GDS-II without getting mired in the transistor-level details.

Equally important is how the solution leverages the Internet. What the short history of the Internet has demonstrated is that good Internet applications must be created from the ground up as Internet applications, not reformulated from existing desktop software. The goal is a browser-based application, not an application that runs in a browser. We believe any true Internet-based application can be characterized by a server-centric architecture, which eliminates the need to develop different software for various computing platforms zero-client design, which allows access from any standard browser customizable design environment, to enable customers to easily integrate the solution into their CAD environment.

There are related benefits to this approach. The net result is an easy-to-comprehend design environment that reduces the need for expensive AE support and user training. Think about how you use other Web-based technology such as that for banking or travel or stock picking. It's a world full of intuitive Web- based forms and menus, easy-to-use commands that are truly no more difficult than pointing and clicking. Imagine this as a standard part of the CAD process-and how you might transform your CAD department, increasing its "value-add" to the design process.

Let's face it, the Web by itself is no panacea. Instead it is proving to be the great enabler. And this is finally becoming a reality for the design industry. New methodologies that leverage the power of the Web to create easy-to-access and easy-to-use design environments, actually expand the universe of people who can do useful work and facilitate the work of larger design teams.

By taking advantage of the latest Internet technologies and removing the product and compatibility issues that result from operating system changes, tool upgrades, and flow-integration incompatibilities, designers can actually spend more time designing and less time worrying about making the tools work together. If that happens-and it must- there will be even more great applications like these that you're reading about in today's Electronic News.