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 (see May 27, page 1).

Newton believes that if the established vendors don't do it, other companies will spring up to meet demand."The World Wide Web, Java, Windows NT: Use that as the starting point for the integration of tools and intellectual property," Newton said, addressing a panel meeting of the DAC technical program on EDA standards. "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."

But once that challenge is met, he added, "the only tool you will need [to own] is a Netscape browser."

The introduction of collaborative design over the Internet challenges current EDA business models, just as it has raised questions in other areas (see May 27, page 1). How will tool-licensing terms and conditions change, and should licensees be allowed to give away or sell access to tools on their servers?

How will intellectual property, in the form of libraries and designs-in-progress, be protected? Where will it reside?

And how will the role of the regional subsidiaries of EDA companies in Europe and the Far East change, especially if they make no local profits?

Multiple models

When asked how he thought a Web-based distributed design system would affect current EDA business practice, Newton said: "The absolute beauty of the Internet is the anarchy of the system. There are lots and lots of business models growing up on the Internet. Maybe vendors will have to make EDA-software access free and make their money servicing the people who try to use it. If it's pay-per-use, the market will decide what the vendor can charge."

The Berkeley project, which will run three years, began in November and is still in its ramp-up phase. It is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under the National Information Infrastructure program. It receives $800,000 per year-a sum that Newton said should fund 10 or 11 graduate students.

The first students working on the project have dubbed their team Weld. Officially, the acronym stands for "why engineers like design," but it conjures an image of disparate design teams and design flows merging over the Internet to weld together chips from separately designed modules.

One goal of the project is to support the addition of third-party tools and libraries, so standardization is a key issue. Newton expects libraries to be added over the course of the project, and he expects and to see complete chips designed over the Web by the time the three years are out. But those chips are more likely to be micromachined sensors and systems than ICs of industrywide relevance and appeal.

The Berkeley team has written its own design-flow manager and finite-state-machine editor using the Java programming language. The design system also makes use of a free Java application-a schematic editor, called DigSim, that was written by Iwan Van Rein in and that, according to Berkeley team members Naji Ghazal and Francis Chan, is a popular Java application. For other tools, software "wrappers" have been written in Java to allow the team to send and receive files over the Web (see figure).

On contacting the Berkeley home page, a user downloads the Java design-flow manager and the FSM editor. Those allow bubble diagrams of FSMs to be drawn. A remote server contains the Nova state encoder-a university-developed tool that assigns values and co nditions to the states and produces an output file in a Berkeley format called Kiss. That format is similar to the i-Logix StateCharts format and is readable by Synopsys's Design Compiler.

The user has very limited control of Design Compiler over the Net but can instruct it to take in the Kiss file and return synthesized VHDL code. Newton said the Weld team plans to improve the presentation models to provide all of the user-interface features of the original tool as an HTML page accessible by the remote user.

Next, the user downloads the DigSim applet, which reads in the VHDL and provides schematic representation at the gate level. It can also provide a net-list output in the industry-standard Electronic Design Interchange Format (EDIF), which is suitable for driving FPGA placement and routing or for instructing a foundry how to make an ASIC version of the design.

Berkeley researchers have also written a power-estimation tool, called PowerPlay, for Web use. David Lidsky delivered a DAC paper on his spreadsheet-based power-estimation tool, which can be hierarchically partitioned. Spreadsheet cells can point to vario us sources of power-estimate information, such as lookup tables extracted from data sheets or a Spice application.

Synopsys support

Newton said Synopsys had been helpful in providing Design Compiler and getting the project started quickly.

Synopsys president and chief executive officer Aart de Geus said that design over the Web is a powerful prospect but that it wouldn't necessarily negate the EDA licensing model. Wherever the software resided, he said, only one person would be able to use it at a time.

Synopsys is already using the Web in a limited fashion in that a hobbled version of its new FPGA Express synthesis tool is available for downloading (see story, page 1). The Web-sourced FPGA Express is limited to handling designs of approximately 1,000 gates. Newton said it would be useful to include that offering at the Weld site.

"The more efficient the access to our tools, the more people will buy them," said Synopsys chairman Harvey Jones.

Jones didn't miss a beat when it was jokingly suggested that Synopsys had three years to embrace the technology before the Berkeley team left academia to form an EDA company. "No, they'll all come and work for Synopsys," he countered.

Rhines enthusiastic

Though Mentor Graphics Corp. is not involved in the Berkeley project, president and chief executive officer Wally Rhines was enthusiastic when told about it. Rhines said that the issue of payment over the Web would not be a problem and could, in any case, be circumvented: "You could get users to prepay for access on a fixed-time basis enabled by a password."

Rhines called the discussion of a specific pay-per-use business model for the Web premature, but he said he could envision certain Mentor tools' being made available over the Web. If not used for mainstream design, he noted, Web access might be provided for use in the extensive private benchmarking that customers typically conduct before committing to a tool purchase.

Other concerns that may arise include the bandwidth needed to transmit a long net-list and the security with which it would be transmitted. Timberwolf Systems Inc., which sells a version of the university-created Timberwolf place-and-route program over the Internet, considered a model similar to Newton's but hasn't yet embraced it.

"People would have to send their proprietary net-lists over the Internet, and they aren't too secure about that," said Carl Sechen, associate professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of Timberwolf. He said users can download Timberwolf from an FTP site but can't send their net-lists to a copy of Timberwolf on a remote server.

If you have a Java-capable browser and would like to experiment with the Berkeley tool chain, visit the Weld team's home page (http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/). The team has promised that the page will offer pointers to the tools by the time you read this.

But, as is often the case with the Web, you may have to be prepared to try again later.

- Additional reporting by Richard Goering.